Alan Maimon

Chuck Myron

If unpredictability is so much of what makes sports compelling, the baseball draft might be the best place to look. This book explores the intricate uncertainties of the draft and the people who face it. Since the modern draft began in 1965, major league teams have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to identify and develop stars of the future. Whether because of injury, poor performance or mental and physical struggles, a large percentage of the most ballyhooed prospects never reach the game’s highest level. Though teams have improved in recent years at turning top picks into major leaguers, the baseball draft is still centered on educated guesswork. This book explains why.

What the Top Picks Teach Us About Selecting Tomorrow’s Major League Stars

Hits and Misses in the Baseball Draft

An Appalachian Reckoning

Twilight in Hazard

Jonah Keri

Andre Dawson

Tim Raines

For more than a decade, Tim Raines patrolled left field for the nascent Montreal Expos, igniting the powder keg of what would become one of the most innovative, entertaining, and talented teams of the modern era. Raines, nicknamed "Rock," hit and stole his way into the hearts of baseball fans across North America. The seven-time all-star tore through the Expos record books before moving on to the Chicago White Sox, New York Yankees, Oakland Athletics, Baltimore Orioles, and Florida Marlins, ultimately earning three World Series rings. And now Raines sit on the cusp of entering Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. But it wasn't always easy playing for the upstart Montreal Expos or being Tim Raines. Raines' performance dipped in 1982, and at the end of the season, Raines entered treatment for substance abuse for cocaine addiction. To avoid leaving the drug in his locker, Raines would carry it in his hip pocket, and would slide headfirst when stealing bases. He used cocaine before games, in his car, after games, and on some occasions between innings in the clubhouse. Raines would later testify at the infamous Pittsburgh drug trials, in September 1985, and would ultimately resume his career at a high level and once again become one of baseball's brightest stars, on and off the field. This memoir entails the life and playing career of one of the sport's all-time greatest leaders and personalities, an honest, raw, and compelling tale of triumph and redemption.

My Life in Baseball's Fast Lane

Rock Solid

Reflecting on his accomplishments, his colleagues, and the future of baseball, Andre Dawson tells the story of his four-decade career as a player and executive in this intimate memoir. Seriously injured at a young age, Dawson struggled with chronic pain throughout his career and was only seriously scouted by the Montreal Expos during college. Overcoming these odds, he went on to be named the National League Rookie of the Year in 1977, earn eight All-Star appearances, seven Gold Gloves, and a Most Valuable Player Award. This behind-the-scenes look at a dedicated player's journey from a segregated Miami neighborhood to the fabled halls of Cooperstown offers fans a window into the psyche of a fan favorite.

An MVP's Life in Baseball

If You Love This Game ...

“This book is harrowing, angering, and, most importantly, true.” —Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home From investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Alan Maimon comes the story of how a perfect storm of events has had a devastating impact on life in small town Appalachia, and on the soul of a shaken nation . . . When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region “like a foreign correspondent would.” And indeed, when Maimon arrived in Hazard, Kentucky fresh off a reporting stint for the New York Times’s Berlin bureau, he felt every bit the outsider. He had landed in a place in the vice grip of ecological devastation and a corporate-made opioid epidemic—a place where vote-buying and drug-motivated political assassinations were the order of the day. While reporting on the intense religious allegiances, the bitter, bareknuckled political rivalries, and the faltering attempts to emerge from a century-long coal-based economy, Maimon learns that everything—and nothing—you have heard about the region is true. And far from being a foreign place, it is a region whose generations-long struggles are driven by quintessentially American forces. Resisting the easy cliches, Maimon’s Twilight in Hazard gives us a profound understanding of the region from his years of careful reporting. It is both a powerful chronicle of a young reporter’s immersion in a place, and of his return years later—this time as the husband of a Harlan County coal miner’s daughter—to find the area struggling with its identity and in the thrall of Trumpism as a political ideology. Twilight in Hazard refuses to mythologize Central Appalachia. It is a plea to move past the fixation on coal, and a reminder of the true costs to democracy when the media retreats from places of rural distress. It is an intimate portrait of a people staring down some of the most pernicious forces at work in America today while simultaneously being asked: How could you let this happen to yourselves? Twilight in Hazard instead tells the more riveting, noirish, and sometimes bitingly humorous story of how we all let this happen.

If unpredictability is so much of what makes sports compelling, the baseball draft might be the best place to look. This book explores the intricate uncertainties of the draft and the people who face it. Since the modern draft began in 1965, major league teams have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to identify and develop stars of the future. Whether because of injury, poor performance or mental and physical struggles, a large percentage of the most ballyhooed prospects never reach the game's highest level. Though teams have improved in recent years at turning top picks into major leaguers, the baseball draft is still centered on educated guesswork. This book explains why.

Alan Maimon

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