Fields of Glory

That grand old tune “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” must have been playing the day author Michael Janacek came into the world. For more than six decades, Janacek, a lifelong baseball fan, was involved at the amateur level as a player, coach, and team manager. With immense passion and an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, he walks us through the history of baseball from 1876 to the present day and regales us with stories of some of the Major League greats—Stan Musial, Eddie Matthews, Andre Dawson, Rickey Henderson, Smokey Joe Wood, Yogi Berra, and many, many more—in Fields of Glory.

When Warren Spahn and Juan Marichal went head to head in the “greatest game ever pitched” with neither team scoring a single run until the 16th inning! The time pitcher Ray Caldwell was struck by lightning mid-game, picked himself up, dusted himself off, and returned to the mound to finish the game! The girl who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig! It’s all here in the pages of this fascinating baseball book.