Espn Baseball Encyclopedia 2009

Espn Baseball Encyclopedia 2009

Sports Illustrated: The College Football Book $12.37 Continuing its series of spectacular coffee-table books for the holiday season, Sports Illustrated presents The College Football Book, the ultimate gift for America`s most passionate fans. SI launched this series in 2005 with The Football Book, devoted to the professional game. A New York Times best-seller that year, the book has taken root as a perennial, selling more than 200,000 copies to date….

The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition (ESPN Pro Baseball Encyclopedia) $24.95 From the sports experts at ESPN comes the most informative baseball compilation ever created—and the next best thing to watching the home team win!  “I want a bumper sticker: You can have my Baseball Encyclopedia when you tear it from my cold, dead hands.”  —Bill James, author of the Historical Baseball Abstract “Baseball fans haven’t been able to get this much for so li…

The history of our world has been shaped by the kaleidoscope of mistakes human beings have made. Do a Google search of the word mistake and you get roughly 121,000,000 results, give or take. Mistakes, in all forms, so permeate the multiple facets of our lives that we have created literally dozens of other words that mean mistake.

You’ve got your blunders, bloopers, bloomers, balks, boners, bobbles, and bungles, and that just the B’s. Never mind the miscues, missteps, misconceptions, miscalculations, and misunderstandings.

Writer James Joyce said, “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”

But Albert Einstein said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

And that would explain why, even though we’ve now opened up roughly 121,000,000 of Joyce’s “portals of discovery,” we continue to make, repeat, and repeat yet again, the original errors.

If Winston Churchill was right when he said, “All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes,” then we are a society of extraordinary idiots. And of course, the sports world is far from immune. In fact, it might best be described as an overgrown forest of fools beyond a pruner’s relieving shear.

We’ve all heard about that one poor sap in our office that accidentally hit “reply all” when his overly personal email was meant for only one set of understanding eyes. And we’ve all laughed a little at his embarrassment, as long as his workplace punishment didn’t go beyond the requisite ridicule from co-workers.

But have you heard about the case of Steelers line coach Larry Zierlein? As probably happens from time-to-time with a professional sports organization that has access to the internet, Zierlein sent out an email that had a pornographic video attached to it. But what doesn’t usually happen, and what makes Zierlein’s email noteworthy in the vast sea of adult oriented online exchanges, is that Zierlein accidentally sent the video to a large list of league recipients that included all 32 team general managers, their secretaries, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

Zierlein kept his job, but suffered more humiliation than any Southwest Airlines “Want to Get Away” commercial could possibly portray. “It’s hard because I made an inexcusable mistake,” Zierlein said. “It was hard first for the organization. They had to explain and go through… and my family, for what they’re going to have to hear.”

Let Zierlein’s pain be your cautionary tale.

We’ve all at some point knocked our heads against an open cabinet, slammed our fingers in some sort of closing door, and stubbed our toe because even though we’ve stepped through it a thousand times before, we forgot this once about the small half-step up in our kitchen’s entryway. But none of those everyday painfully humbling mishaps compare to what kicker Bill Gramatica did as a rookie in 2001. Celebrating a meaningless 42-yard first quarter field goal for the not-going-anywhere Arizona Cardinals, Gramatica began hopping around like his feet were on fire.

This was Gramatica’s standard celebration following kicks of any length or importance, including extra points. But what wasn’t standard, and what made Gramatica a laughing stock, and secured him a permanent place on the all-time dumbest sports injuries list, was the torn ACL that his hopping resulted in, ending his season.

And we’ve all, at least once, been late in meeting a boss’s or teacher’s deadline on a work or school assignment. But it’s also probably safe to say that afterwards we weren’t raked over the coals for it by the local and national media, as were the Minnesota Vikings when in 2003 they were late in making their first round draft pick. The Vikings had the seventh pick in that April’s draft, but by letting the clock run out on them before submitting their selection to league officials, they didn’t actually pick until ninth.

When, at every yearly NFL draft, the commissioner says, “[insert team name here] is on the clock,” between each and every pick, it’s best to take that clock seriously.

These mistakes and errors in judgment driven by Einstein’s theory of infinite human stupidity are mere drops in a bottomless bucket that overflows with unadulterated moronity. And in truth, at the end of the day in these few examples here, there was very little collateral damage. The parties injured by these wrong turns in reason were contained to the small group of offenders.

But of course lapses in brain function are not always benign. For every ill-advised interoffice email deleted and then forgotten, and for each self-inflicted knee injury that fails to make a difference in the season’s final standings, there are dim-witted decisions of considerable consequence. Moves made or not made, things said and done, and blunders in strategy that have at times altered the course of sports history in dramatic and meaningful ways.

Very few vocations are as committed to keeping the record of past triumphs and failures as is the world of sports. The Baseball Encyclopedia chronicles every single at-bat taken throughout the history of baseball – the home runs and the strikeouts. Pro Football Weekly keeps track of every win and loss, touchdown and turnover, and eventual Super Bowl Champion. And if you have a basketball question involving a player, stat, or game result, Inside Hoops is the place to go.

But when it comes to errors of the mind, decisions absurdly divergent from practices that are tried and true, and regrettable words and actions that will forever haunt the men and women who made them, the history books are noticeably quiet.

Not anymore.

Kyle Gartlett, Writer and Motivational Speaker, is a former sports writer at Fox Sports Net for Fox Sports News, The NFL This Morning, The Best Damn Sports Show Period, and more, from 99′-00′ before becoming the Senior Writer at FSN until 04′ Kyle has since gone freelance and still contributes to FoxSports.com, ESPN The Magazine, and is the author of two books. For more information on Kyle and his books, including his recent, What Were They Thinking?: The Brainless Blunders That Changed Sports History, please visit http://www.ironmankyle.com/

*NEW* Ed and Charles O’Bannon Interview! Speak on Lil’ Wayne…

It is very easy to get into the habit of pulling off the ball. This is especially true for power hitters. Have you ever seen a power hitter hit a home run and thereafter, he can’t couch the ball? What happened? The home run took him out of himself. So as he pivots, he is also pivoting his head. Read the rest of it here: Click Here