Bob Feller is a true baseball icon. Along with such legends as Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Ted Williams, he is recognized as one of the greatest players of the twentieth century. In fact, he was voted the greatest right-handed pitcher in the history of baseball. But Bob Feller is known for his quick wit as much as for his fastball. In Bob Feller's Little Black Book of Baseball Wisdom, the sharp-tongued Hall of Famer offers philosophical, anecdotal, and candid reflections on baseball and everyday American life. In the process he introduces us to such legends as Jackie Robinson, Ralph Kiner, and Joe DiMaggio the way he knew them--as baseball rivals, fellow sportsmen, and good friends. Bob Feller's Little Black Book of Baseball Wisdom is a treasure trove of down-to-earth advice for baseball fans of any generation.

From hard-working farm boy growing up in post-World War I Van Meter, Iowa, to the youngest All-Star and longest-lived Hall of Famer, sharp-witted Bob Feller distills nine decades of hard-earned wisdom--gleaned from experiences both on and off the diamond--in his new Little Blue Book of Baseball Wisdom, a sequel to his best-selling Little Black Book of Baseball Wisdom. Feller writes tellingly of the stars of his generation, but also shares the essential virtues which made him so successful--life lessons he learned from his father, who, eager to showcase his son's baseball talent, built a "field of dreams" on their Iowa farm when Feller was still a teen, lessons he learned fighting for his country in World War II, and lessons he learned subsequent to his baseball career.

Bob Feller’s journey from an Iowa farm to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, began in 1936. That’s when the 17-year-old pitcher took the mound for the Cleveland Indians and struck out a scrappy shortstop—and future Hall of Famer—named Leo Durocher. The blistering speed of Feller’s fastball would soon earn him the nickname “Rapid Robert,” as well as the respect of the top players in the game. For 18 years, Feller would remain among the game’s finest pitchers, facing down such fearsome hitters as Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, and Hank Greenberg, and amassing the remarkable record of 266 victories and 2,581 strikeouts. In all, Feller led the American League in strikeouts a remarkable seven times, including fanning 348 batters in 1946 and sharing the Major League record of 12 one-hitters. Even more impressive, he achieved these distinguished records despite missing almost four full seasons at his prime while serving in the US Navy during World War II. In this classic baseball memoir, Bob Feller recounts his remarkable career, revealing the man behind the legend, and offering a perspective on the game that is both insightful and candid. Never one to hold his tongue, Feller presents a “warts-and-all” discussion of the all-time greatest players and personalities and explains how television changed everything, and why free agency may be both the best and worst thing to happen to baseball. A must-read for any fan, Now Pitching, Bob Feller is the entertaining and enlightening story of one of baseball’s all-time greats. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Sports Publishing imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in sports—books about baseball, pro football, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, or soccer, we have a book about your sport or your team. Whether you are a New York Yankees fan or hail from Red Sox nation; whether you are a die-hard Green Bay Packers or Dallas Cowboys fan; whether you root for the Kentucky Wildcats, Louisville Cardinals, UCLA Bruins, or Kansas Jayhawks; whether you route for the Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, or Los Angeles Kings; we have a book for you. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Novelist W. P. Kinsella wrote that baseball is “a game where little gems of wisdom or whimsy can be created in the dugout, the bullpen, or the press box during long, hot afternoons and evenings of baseball.” The Little Red Book of Baseball Wisdom unearths a treasury of quotes reflecting more than a century’s worth of history from our national pastime. Featuring contributions from Hank Aaron to Walt Whitman, Yogi Berra to John Updike.

Genuine fans take the best team moments with the less than great, and know that the games that are best forgotten make the good moments truly shine. This monumental book of the Cleveland Indians documents all the best moments and personalities in the history of the team, but also unmasks the regrettably awful and the unflinchingly ugly. In entertaining—and unsparing—fashion, this book sparkles with Indians highlights and lowlights, from wonderful and wacky memories to the famous and infamous. Such moments include the impressive playoff run in 2007 and the opening of Jacobs Field, but also the 23-2 loss to the Twins in 2003 and the debacle that was the “ten cent beer night” in 1974. Whether providing fond memories, goose bumps, or laughs, this portrait of the team is sure to appeal to the fan who has been through it all.

The riveting story of four men—Larry Doby, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paige—whose improbable union on the Cleveland Indians in the late 1940s would shape the immediate postwar era of Major League Baseball and beyond. In July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar sparked one of the wildest and most meaningful seasons in baseball history. In intimate, absorbing detail, Luke Epplin's Our Team traces the story of the integration of the Cleveland Indians and their quest for a World Series title through four key participants: Bill Veeck, an eccentric and visionary owner adept at exploding fireworks on and off the field; Larry Doby, a soft-spoken, hard-hitting pioneer whose major-league breakthrough shattered stereotypes that so much of white America held about Black ballplayers; Bob Feller, a pitching prodigy from the Iowa cornfields who set the template for the athlete as businessman; and Satchel Paige, a legendary pitcher from the Negro Leagues whose belated entry into the majors whipped baseball fans across the country into a frenzy. Together, as the backbone of a team that epitomized the postwar American spirit in all its hopes and contradictions, these four men would captivate the nation by storming to the World Series--all the while rewriting the rules of what was possible in sports.