Here are two stories from Diamonds in the Rough, the untold story of baseball, written by Joel Zoss and John Bowman. Sad stories, these, but worth reading (and learning from them).

Dizzy Dean's demise also began with an injury from a batter, when Earl Averill hit him in the toe with a liner in the 1937 All-Star game. Dean could have healed completely, but it was his misfortune to be the greatest draw in baseball since Babe Ruth.

Encouraged by Cardinals management and his own eagerness, he returned to the mound with his toe in a splint, altered his delivery to favor his sore foot, and destroyed his arm. Before 1937 he had averaged twenty-five wins per season for the preceding four seasons; after 1937 he averaged fewer than four wins per season.

...it's axiomatic in baseball that those who play when they're injured get paid the most, and superstars are simply too valuable to be kept out of the lineup. Aggravating the situation are the team physicians, who are paid by the club management, and who sometimes find themselves telling athletes to play when they should recommend bed rest.

Such apparently was the situation in the case of J.R. Richard, Houston's star pitcher of 1980, whose team physicians diagnosed as having a blood clot in his neck. They told him to play out the season, but during his first workout after the diagnosis, Richard had a stroke and nearly died.

The Boston Globe calls Wild and Outside, simply, "A great book!" Peter Grammons of ESPN has said that "to understand the Northern League is to understand the past and future of grassroots baseball in America."

Mr. Fatsis's book is about the "completely independent" Northern League of Professional Baseball. He invites readers to "...come to Sioux Falls and Sioux City, St. Paul and Duluth, Fargo and Madison, Thunder Bay and Winnipeg, where baseball is wild and outside--and where fans and players alike have rediscovered the fun and romance of the game."

In the basement of Mickey Mantle's restaurant in New York City, there are cartons of letters and cards that were sent to Mickey between the time he received his liver transplant in June and the time he died on August 13, 1995.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

There is a letter from a person who identified himself as a certified public accountant but who had once been a batboy for the Chicago White Sox. "Over thirty years ago," said the writer, "a kid approached you saying that his American History teacher said anyone making over $100,000 a year owned a yacht, so would you please sign a baseball saying you don't own a yacht. You took the time to sign, 'I don't own a yacht.' I will never forget you for that."

Another writer told Mantle that it had been "...32 years since I saw you in person. I used to live in the Van Wyck Apartments.

You and Roger and Yogi and the guys used to come in from practice. You helped us always with batting, fielding, etc. I remember going to Hal Reniff's apartment one day and having a soda. Roger and you came in one day and saw us playing. You stopped and taught us how to catch a fly ball in the sun. Those are days that will live with me forever.

One day, the whole team comes over and signs my mitt. So thrilled, being only seven.

I wish my son had someone to idolize these days, as long as I have idolized you."

...is that this is a terrific book for baseball players too. Why? Because Dr. Tom Amberry, the author, teaches you how to use the secret of focus and concentration, set up practice routines and develop "game confidence." These are the skills you need in any sport!

Dr. Tom Amberry is the 73 year old athlete who sank 2,750 consecutive free throws without a miss! (He was 71 at the time he did this.) What is interesting is that Dr. Tom's strategy for success is a seven-step program. Ballplayers of all ages can read Dr. Tom's book, then create their own plan for improving such skills as bunting, baserunning, batting, and throwing. You can teach yourself with a little help from little books like Dr. Tom's. It's just 120 pages long. Price: around $12.00 which includes shipping.

Here is an excerpt from Dr. Tom Amberry's book, Free Throw:

It has been said that 'great free throw shooters are born, not made.' I completely disagree. In fact, I think this must have been said by a lazy basketball player who was looking for an excuse for his poor free throw shooting. Here's an interesting story:

Magic Johnson is more workmanlike than his showgame reputation mught suggest. How many kids know that he was an above-average 78.5% free throw shooter as a freshman at Michigan State and then worked his way up to 91.1% by his tenth season in the pros. Asked him how he did it. Magic had a simple response. "150 shots a day."

The JUGS Company® has worked with a small fundraising company called Campus Resources for over a decade. Doug Springmann, the president of Campus Resources, has come up with some genuinely clever ways for teams and schools to raise money. Remarkably, Doug's projects require no risk, no direct selling, and no handling of cash! Seems impossible, but his claims are true.

For 20 years the Campus Resources people have worked nationwide with all age groups, from elementary schools to major universities (Penn State, NYU, and MIT to name a few). They have worked with groups with less than ten members (who earned over $2,000 in a week!) to very large groups who have earned $50,000.

If your team or school is interested in getting help in setting up a fund raising program that emphasizes quality products, excellent service, and, most of all, results, call Doug Springmann at Campus Resources. The number is 757-253-1830. (Fax 752-253-0359).

Another unique fun-filled fund-raiser is called Long Ball. Bruce Geelboed and Rob Barber invented the Long Ball batting contest concept, which local baseball and softball leagues can use as a fund-raiser or to promote more enthusiasm for their local programs. A Long Ball tournament is a batting contest where two-member teams score points by batting baseballs or softballs pitched from an automatic pitching machine. In a Long Ball contest, players may score points by hitting a fair ball (regardless of distance), by hitting a ball on the fly past designated markers on the field, or by hitting balls over the fence for a home run.

In the 1996 inaugural Long Ball championship in Muncie, Indiana, contests were held in the 9-10 age bracket and the 11-12 age bracket. The winner of the 9-10 contest was the team of Travis Smith and Colby Brand who amassed 273 total points in the contest. The individual high point winner in the 9-10 contest was Joel Nickels who scored 196 points for his team. In the 11-12 age bracket, the winning team was the Long Ballers, consisting of Brad Miller and Matt Gard who amassed 542 total points. The individual point winner in the 11-12 contest was Brad Wilson who scored 369 points, including 8 home runs.

For more information about the Long Ball contest, including use of logo, tournament manual, and contest materials, contact:

This collection of fascinating facts about the origins of almost everything under the sun wll delight you. Whether you want to learn about the beginnings of great religions or comic books, you'll find it here.

Following are Mr. Panati's revelations about "Sports in 6,000 B.C." and most importantly (for some of us!) the real beginnings of baseball.

Man conceived the ideas that lead to sports only after self-preservation ceased to be his constant preoccupation. This occurred some time after the establishment of farms and the domestication of animals and was first observed in the cradles of civilization in Egypt, along the Nile River and in Mesopotamia, now part of Iraq.

Among the earliest avocations of the ancient Egyptians were a game of bowling strikingly similiar to the modern version, an entertainment called "throwing sticks" (which may have been like dominoes), and the first game known to involve a ball and players. Strangely enough, this last gme was played only by girls.

The most significant single development in the history of sports certainly was the ball.

We know that wild apes and chimpanzees toss rocks, stones, and pounded fruits, so there may never have been a time in human evolution when some form of ball was not chased, batted, or thrown. The two earliest civilizations, the Egyptian and the Sumarian, were both familiar with the ball, which was either a sculpted piece of light wood or strips of leather sewn together and stuffed with hair, feathers, or cloth. Later, the bladders of animals were inflated and covered with leather to minimize the risk of puncture.

Pinpointing baseball's origin has long baffled historians. There seems little doubt that the game came to America from England, where it was played as a children's diversion called "rounders" and is pictured in a 1764 woodcut as "base-ball."

But rounders differed strikingly from the version of the game introduced to America in the 1840s by Alexander Cartwright. The former called for a fielder to put out a runner heading for a base by hitting him with the ball, precluded use of the hardball, which was a hallmark of Cartwright's game. Cartwright recognized the need for tagging a runner in some way--either by touching him with the ball or with the hand holding the ball. The introduction of Cartwright's hardball, initially a miniature cricket ball, coincided with the formation of the first baseball organization, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club of New York in 1845, which helped popularize the sport that was to become America's national pastime.

Uncovering the game's British origin proved difficult because of men like A.G. Spalding, a sporting goods magnate, who formed the Spalding Commission in order to refute the "preposterous idea" that any foreign nation could have contributed in the slightest way to the great American invention of baseball. Defying all British claims by this spirit of nationalism, the Spalding Commission reported in the official 1908 Baseball Guide that the game was exclusively American, from its modern rules to diamond dimensions to even its name, which could be traced to Abner Doubleday, who had organized the first game on a field at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. Only thirty years later, when a historian from the New York Public Library, Robert W. Henderson, issued his own scholarly study of the game's roots, was the English bid legitimized.

Corroborative evidence for the British case were the woodcut and the name appled to it ("base-ball"), and a novel by Jane Austen, written in 1798 and entitled Northanger Abbey, in which the heroine as a child is dscribed as preferring to books "cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country." The book containing the "base-ball" woodcut, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, was published twice in America before the end of the 18th century, and there is evidence that soldiers in the continental Army at Valley Forge may have played the game first as British subjects before joining the colonial cause.