"While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make...

Grant Petersen shares a lifetime of unexpected facts, controversial opinions, expert techniques, and his own maverick philosophy.

"As Americans increasingly embrace soccer, one of the country's most respected sports columnists has been covering the world's signature tournament for three decades. In Eight World Cups George Vecsey of The New York Times pulls back the curtain on the beautiful game. Blending witty travelogue with action on the field--and shady dealings in the back rooms--Vecsey offers an eye-opening, globetrotting account of the last eight World Cups, chronicling...

In mid-twentieth-century England, fourteen-year-old Velvet Brown, determined to turn the unruly horse she wins in a raffle into a champion, learns that she needs more than hard work and dedication to achieve her goal of riding her horse in the Grand National steeplechase.

"Football is the country's most popular pastime, and yet most of what happens in today's NFL is a mystery. The New York Jets gave Nicholas Dawidoff a security code, a locker, an office in the scouting department, and for an entire year he lived with the team. He has written a vivid, funny, and moving narrative about an emblematic NFL season that deepens the way we know the game. In Collision Low Crossers, Dawidoff introduces us to a memorable cast...

An account of the first twenty years of Major League Soccer traces the league's organization in the years prior to its 1996 launch, its resilience and growth, and the rise of the supporters who have defined what it means to be a North American soccer fan.

"The first biography of Affirmed, the last horse to win the Triple Crown The descendent of Man o War and War Admiral, Affirmed won all three stages of the Triple Crown in 1978 by a combined margin of less than two lengths over rival Alydar. Lou Sahadi draws on interviews with Steve Cauthen, the family of owner Louis Wolfson, and many more to tell the story of this courageous horse, whose unrivaled combination of speed and heart twice earned him Horse...

"Structured to mirror the flow of a baseball game, THROWBACK covers everything that happens both in plain sight and behind the scenes (or sometime in whispered invective at the plate or in the bullpen), from the players' pre-game routines and the pitcher's warm-up tosses, to the hidden signs the catcher and pitcher use to communicate to outwit hitters; from infielders' often amusing conversations with men at first and third bases, to the specific...

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, tucked away in upstate New York in a small town called Cooperstown, is far from any major media market or big league stadium. Yet no sports hall of fame's membership is so hallowed, nor its qualifications so debated, nor its voting process so dissected. Since its founding in 1936, the Hall of Fame's standards for election have been nebulous, and its selection processes arcane, resulting in confusion among...

"With its three-hour-long contests, 162-game seasons, and countless measurable variables, baseball is a sport which lends itself to self-reflection and obsessive analysis. It's a thinking game. It's also a shifting game. Nowhere is this more evident than in the statistical revolution which has swept through the pastime in recent years, bringing metrics like WAR, OPS, and BABIP into front offices and living rooms alike. So what's on the horizon for...