Showing results by publisher "University Press Audiobooks" in Sports & Outdoors

After an arduous overland journey, Levi Scott and his son John arrived in Oregon City in November 1844. Scott joined the Jesse Applegate's 1846 expedition seeking a better, safer way through the Cascades to the Willamette Valley. Their new southern route wound through the Umpqua Valley, three mountain ranges, and the Black Rock Desert before meeting the established California Trail.

From Major League Baseball's inception in the 1880s through World War II, team owners enjoyed monopolistic control of the industry. Despite the players' desire to form a viable union, every attempt to do so failed. In the mid-1960s, star players Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale staged a joint holdout for multiyear contracts and much higher salaries. Their holdout quickly drew support from the public; for the first time, owners realized they could ill afford to alienate fans, their primary source of revenue.

Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend is the first book to tell the full story of Speaker’s turbulent life and to document in sharp detail the grit and glory of his pivotal role in baseball’s dead-ball era. Playing for the Boston Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians in the early part of the 20th century, Tris “Spoke” Speaker put up numbers that amaze us even today: his record for career doubles - 792 - may never be approached, let alone broken.

Pedro Martinez. Sammy Sosa. Manny Ramirez By 2000, Dominican baseball players were in every Major League clubhouse, and regularly winning every baseball award. In 2002, Omar Minaya became the first Dominican general manager of a Major League team. But how did this codependent relationship between MLB and Dominican talent arise and thrive?

Meredith Mason Brown traces Daniel Boone's life from his Pennsylvania childhood to his experiences in the militia and his rise as an unexcelled woodsman, explorer, and backcountry leader. In the process, we meet the authentic Boone: he didn't wear coonskin caps; he read and wrote better than many frontiersmen; he was not the first to settle Kentucky; he took no pleasure in killing Indians. At once a loner and a leader, a Quaker who became a skilled frontier fighter, Boone is a study in contradictions.

The Players League, formed in 1890, was a short-lived professional baseball league controlled and owned, in part, by the players themselves, a response to the National League’s salary cap and “reserve rule” which bound players for life to one particular team. Led by John Montgomery Ward, the Players League was a star-studded group that included most of the best players of the National League who bolted, not only to gain control of their wages but also to share ownership of the teams.

Navigating the Spanish Lake examines Spain's long presence in the Pacific Ocean (1521-1898) in the context of its global empire. Building on a growing body of literature on the Atlantic world and indigenous peoples in the Pacific, this pioneering book investigates the historiographical "Spanish Lake" as an artifact that unites the Pacific Rim (the Americas and Asia) and Basin (Oceania) with the Iberian Atlantic.

With cities across the country adding miles of bike lanes and building bike-share stations, bicycling is enjoying a new surge of popularity in America. It seems that every generation or two, Americans rediscover the freedom of movement, convenience, and relative affordability of the bicycle. The earliest two-wheeler, the draisine, arrived in Philadelphia in 1819 and astonished onlookers with the possibility of propelling themselves "like lightning".

At his three-year debut in June 1960, no one could know that Mrs. Allaire DuPont’s small, deerlike gelding named Kelso would come to dominate American racing like no other horse before or since. In Kelso: The Horse of Gold, Linda Kennedy tells the remarkable story of one of the greatest athletes of the ages, recreating the excitement of "Kelly's" unique and brilliant career while placing his unparalleled achievements in the context of racing history.

In this concise social history of golf in the United States from the 1880s to the present, George B. Kirsch tracks the surprising growth of golf as a popular, mainstream sport, in contrast to the stereotype of golf as a pastime enjoyed only by the rich elite.While golf retains a strong association with upper-class, male-dominated, socially exclusive country clubs, it has also boasted a dedicated following among Americans from different social classes, ethnic backgrounds, races, and genders.

Lefty O'Doul relates the untold story of one of baseball's greatest hitters, most colorful characters, and the unofficial father of professional baseball in Japan.

The hardening of racial lines during the first half of the 20th century eliminated almost all African Americans from white organized sports, forcing black athletes to form their own teams, organizations, and events. This separate sporting culture, explored in the 12 essays included here, comprised much more than athletic competition; these “separate games” provided examples of black enterprise and black self-help and showed the importance of agency and the quest for racial uplift in a country fraught with racialist thinking and discrimination.

General managers and fans alike have pondered this most important of baseball questions. The Moneyball strategy is not the first example of how new ideas and innovative management have transformed the way teams are assembled. Pursuit of Pennants examines and analyzes a number of compelling, winning baseball teams over the past 100-plus years, focusing on their decision making and how they assembled their championship teams.

In Long Hops, physicist Mark Denny explains, in a clear, conversational style, the science of bird migration - from the intricacies of bird aeronautics to the newly unraveled mysteries of their magnetic compasses. While providing wherever possible examples of indigenous Hawaiian species, the book surveys the migration phenomenon as a whole, showing that birds are breathtaking works of engineering with spectacular capabilities for long-distance flights.

Throughout the NCAA Tournament’s history, underdogs, Cinderella stories, and upsets have captured the attention and imagination of fans. Making March Madness is the story of this premiere tournament, from its early days in Kansas City, to its move to Madison Square Garden, to its surviving a point-shaving scandal in New York and taking its games to different sites across the country.

Forget the steroid-addled, overpaid, and unmotivated players: America's pastime is still alive and well and is still the heartfelt sport it's always been...in the minor leagues. And nowhere is this truer than in Kentucky, whose rich baseball history continues to play out in the four teams profiled in this audiobook. Following these teams through the 2010 season - the triumphs, struggles, and big-league hopes and dreams - the book tells the larger story of baseball in America's smaller venues.

Isaac Burns Murphy (1861-1896) was one of the most dynamic jockeys of his era. Still considered one of the finest riders of all time, Murphy was the first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby three times, and his 44 percent win record remains unmatched. Despite his success, Murphy was pushed out of thoroughbred racing when African American jockeys were forced off the track, and he died in obscurity. In The Prince of Jockeys: The Life of Isaac Burns Murphy, author Pellom McDaniels III offers the first definitive biography of this celebrated athlete.

Confessions of a Horseshoer offers a close and personal look at the mind-set of a professional horseshoer (farrier) who also happens to be a college professor. The audiobook, an ironic and playful view of the many unusual animals (and people) Ron Tatum has encountered over thirty-seven years, is nicely balanced between straightforward presentation, self-effacing humor, and lightly seasoned wisdom. It captures the day-to-day life of a somewhat cantankerous old guy.

Following the 1957 season, two of baseball’s most famous teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, left the city they had called home since the 19th century and headed west. The Dodgers went to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco. Those events have entered baseball lore, and indeed the larger culture, as acts of betrayal committed by greedy owners Walter O’Malley of the Dodgers and Horace Stoneham of the Giants.

Rather than as a Falstaffian figure of limited intellect, Edmund Wehrle reveals Babe Ruth as an ambitious, independent operator, one not afraid to challenge baseball’s draconian labor system. To the baseball establishment, Ruth’s immense popularity represented opportunity, but his rebelliousness and potential to overturn the status quo presented a threat. After a decades-long campaign waged by baseball to contain and discredit him, the image of Ruth that baseball perpetuated still informs how many people remember Babe Ruth to this day.