Baseball Junkie is about more than baseball. Why would a two-time World Series champion who has achieved a level of success most men only dream about find himself on his knees, weeping, a loaded .357 Magnum pressed against his temple? Aubrey confronts his demons in Baseball Junkie. The book takes you on a wild roller-coaster ride from his humble beginnings as a quiet, shy kid growing up in a trailer park in a small Texas town, through the brutal murder of his father, to an Adderall-infused egomaniac standing in front of a million-plus Giants fans at the 2010 World Series parade in downtown San Francisco, proudly displaying women's underwear, his "rally thong," for the world to see. As a two-time World Series Champion who reached the pinnacle of Major League Baseball before retiring at age thirty-six in 2012, Aubrey Huff earned a place in Major League Baseball history. Baseball Junkie uses brutal honesty, humor, and first-person narration to draw an intimate portrait of life in the big leagues. Aubrey bares all, taking the reader inside the complex life and mind of a man as he balances victories with the crippling demons of addiction, divorce, anxiety, depression, and feelings of inferiority. It inspires each of us to seek more than what this world has to offer. To rise above mediocrity and achieve our true potential while staying focused on what really matters when the fame and excitement of the game fade with the sunset.

Combining the content of two of Frommer's previous books, Sports Roots and Sports Lingo, this book not only explains how nicknames, namesakes, trophies, competitions, and expressions in the world of sports came to be, but also serves as a useful dictionary of the language of sports-both technical and slang.

Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic 60-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark, fetid backwater and now the most populous, sophisticated, and safe urban capital in the world. Follow author Robert Whiting (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld) as he watches Tokyo transform during the 1964 Olympics, rubs shoulders with the Yakuza and comes face to face with the city’s dark underbelly, interviews Japan’s baseball elite after publishing his first best-selling book on the subject, and learns how politics and sports collide to produce a cultural landscape unlike any other, even as a new Olympics is postponed and the COVID virus ravages the nation. A colorful social history of what Anthony Bourdain dubbed, “the greatest city in the world,” Tokyo Junkie is a revealing account by an accomplished journalist who witnessed it all firsthand and, in the process, had his own dramatic personal transformation.

Focusing on such athletes as Art Pennington, Bruno Haas, and Bill Lange, Salin presents the stories of more than a dozen former players, many in his own words. 15 photos.

Conbining two of Frommer's previous successes, Sports Lingo and Sports Roots, and supplemented with new material, this book will prove to be indispensable to nay sports enthusiast wishing to settle an argument, decipher a mysterious call, or simply persue for his or her enjoyment.

Propounding his "small ball theory" of sports literature, George Plimpton proposed that "the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature." Of course he had the relatively small baseball in mind, because its literature is formidable--vast and varied, instructive, often wildly entertaining, and occasionally brilliant. From this bewildering array of baseball books, Ron Kaplan has chosen 501 of the best, making it easier for fans to find just the books to suit them (or to know what they're missing). From biography, history, fiction, and instruction to books about ballparks, business, and rules, anyone who loves to read about baseball will find in this book a companionable guide, far more fun than a reference work has any right to be.