Bases Loaded
When the hated owner of Empty Creek’s minor league baseball team is murdered, Penelope Warren and her cat, Big Mike, try to find the killer.
"...the haunting story of Blockade Billy , the greatest Major League baseball player to be erased from the game. Even the most die-hard baseball fans don't know the true story of William 'Blockade Billy' Blakely. He may have been the greatest player the game has ever seen, but today no one remembers his name. He was the first--and only--player to have his existence completely removed from the record books. Even his team is long forgotten, barely a footnote in the game's history. Every effort was made to erase any evidence that William Blakely played professional baseball, and with good reason. Blockade Billy had a secret darker than any pill or injection that might cause a scandal in sports today. His secret was much, much worse... and only Stephen King, the most gifted storyteller of our age, can reveal the truth to the world, once and for all."
This third book in the Hart's Crossing series finds a baseball-playing, ten-year-old girl determined to make a love connection between her own single mother and her widowed baseball coach.
An abandoned baby is found in the clubhouse at Fenway Park. The nurses at Deaconess name him Ted Williams, what else? A promising minor league pitcher goes missing. A player agent is caught up in a web of blackmail. A woman's body turns up in the Back Bay fens. Enter Rocky Patel, Boston Homicide Detective First Grade, ordered to connect the dots. And joining him out of left field, an anonymous blogger who knows too much.
"Queens, New York: Johnny Bondano is the premier hit man for the Lucchesi crime family. Ruthless and cold-blooded but with a strict moral code, Johnny is given instructions to find and kill a man who took the life of a crime boss's only grandson. He suspects the family isn't telling him everything about his latest assignment, but to question his orders is tantamount to suicide. As these three men's destinies converge, loyalties are tested and dreams collide with violent and unpredictable results."
An electronic audio book that may be downloaded to a personal player.
A fallen baseball star must use his new skills as Boston's king of sports radio to outwit a dangerous caller and prove--live and on the air--that the hit-and-run that killed his wife was no accident.
On a visit to Cooperstown, Mickey Rawlings, the oldest living ex-ballplayer, discovers his baseball card and is transported back to the Boston of April 1912--when the newspapers are full of stories about the Titanic , which has just sunk, and Fenway Park is brand new. Rawlings, a utility infielder just brought up by the Red Sox, reports to Fenway and trips over the body of Red Corriden, whose head has been smashed by a baseball bat.
Also available as an audio book to download.
A talented athlete, Johnny Wrigley firmly believes that someday he will play major league baseball. But on the way to his dreams, Johnny life takes a detour when as a newly-minted Marine, he finds love on a brief stop in Wichita.
"His grandfather, a fireman for thirty years and horribly scarred, harbors a dark secret that has caused a deep rift between him and Scooter’s dad. Scooter’s grandfather sees the game of baseball as the game of life itself—-to him all of life’s great lessons are explained in baseball lore, and he teaches Scooter to play the game in a way that’s different from how his father wants him to play. He teaches Scooter as well that life can be defined in a few extraordinary moments—-moments of courage, of cowardice—-when the ability to act, or not, defines who you are, and who you will become. Into this world, a world that becomes increasingly less kind to Scooter, the defining moments his grandfather has warned him about come at a rapid pace, and as the years pass and Scooter grows up, it is through baseball and its timeless rhythms that the defining moments in Scooter’s life are played out and that the boy he is now, and the young man he will become, are shaped."
Could the curse of the Bambino be over? For eighty-four, count 'em, eighty-four miserable seasons, the Boston Red Sox have endured nothing but defeat and heartbreak. Finally, there is hope. From the hinterlands of Texas comes the sensational Ron Kane, a strapping rookie pitcher whose fastball scorches the radar gun at an ungodly 110 miles per hour. He can also handle the bat. And play the outfield. With Kane dazzling sellout crowds, the Red Sox are suddenly a juggernaut. The only fly in the ointment -- a big, ugly horsefly -- is the fact that murder seems to be stalking the club. Chicago . . . Detroit . . . Kansas City . . . wherever the Sox play, a killer strikes, marking his victims with strange ritualistic symbols.
Ray Kinsella hears a voice, followed by a brief vision of a baseball field. He believes that if he builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield, Shoeless Joe Jackson from the infamous 1919 Chicago "Black" Sox will return to play baseball. By being willing to take a chance, Ray gets a second time up at bat in life. Basis of the film, Field of Dreams.
Each summer, on the fields of glorious Cape Marlin, off the New England coast, the nation's best college players gather to play the most important baseball of their lives. Jack Faber is a young hotshot pitcher with an unhittable slider and a rocket for a fastball. He plays for the fabled Seapuit Seawolves and dreams of making the Big Show. But a new coach, the scowling Bruno Riazzi, a former pro catcher, resents the kid's celebrity status and decides to knock him down a peg or two. And he stops at nothing to make it happen. Humiliated, Jack loses his lifelong art, and with it his passion for the game, as well as, mysteriously, his ability to throw. A devastated Jack Faber is released from the St. Charles College roster. But the Seawolves coaches won't give up on him.
It's 1905 and the Chicago Cubs are banking on superstar Donald "Duke" Dennison's golden arm to help them win the pennant. Only one thing stands between Duke and an unprecedented ten-thousand-dollar contract: alcohol.
Sam Ward is a 32-year-old career minor leaguer called up for a September cup of coffee with the Chicago Cubs. Ernie Kolcka is a veteran umpire who'll end a lengthy career with the season's final game between the Cubs and the Phillies. The winner of the game will go on to the play-offs; the loser goes home. Circumstances coalesce to entangle Ward and Kolcka.
The high spot of Teddy Folger's life was the day in 1954 that he got a very special autographed baseball card from Joe DiMaggio himself. It's been downhill ever since. Which is why he just unloaded his freeloading wife and torched his own comic-book store in a strip plaza in Mobile, Alabama. Now Teddy's sitting pretty at the Tiki Bar in Pensacola, Florida, chugging cocktails, unaware that he just pulled off the stupidest insurance scam in American history." "Enter Conner Samson. The down-on-his-luck repo man has just been hired to repossess Teddy's boat. What he doesn't know is there's a priceless stowaway on board - a signed baseball card that some men are willing to kill for. Like Ahira Kurisaka, Yakuza boss and rabid collector of American pop culture. He already paid top dollar for a fingernail clipping from Elvis. Now he wants Folger's DiMaggio card, and has just unleashed a team of bounty hunters to get it for him
Hungry for a pennant, young Veeck jettisons the team's white players and secretly recruits the legendary stars of the Negro Leagues, fielding a club that will go down in baseball annals as one of the greatest ever to play the game. Here are the behind-the-scenes adventures that bring this dream to reality, and a cast of characters only history's pen could create: the players themselves-the tragic Josh Gibson, the remarkable but self-centered Satchel Paige, the Cuban wonder Martin Dihigo, the veteran stalwarts Cool Papa Bell, Willie Wells, and Buck Leonard, and the rising stars Roy Campanella, Artie Wilson, and Dave Barnhill--plus Walter Winchell, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and J. Edgar Hoover!
Decades before Field of Dreams there was The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the classic baseball fable that became the hit movie and musical Damn Yankees. Now a new generation is ready to discover this delightful book, restored to its original title, with a new introduction by baseball writer Bill James. Baseball lovers everywhere can identify with Joe Boyd, a die-hard Washington Senators fan who puts his soul in hock to help them wrest the pennant away from the hated, all-conquering Yankees. Transformed by the sulfurous Mr. Applegate's satanic magic into twenty-two-year-old phenom Joe Hardy, he leads the hapless Senators in a torrid late-season pursuit of the men in pinstripes. Joe has until September 21st before the deal becomes final...and eternal....
Showtime Charlie Stoddard now occupies himself at card shows, one-night stands, and nearby watering holes. His ex-wife still talks to him, but keeps her distance (about 3,000 miles); his son won't even do that--all in all, a life filled with peaches and cream. And then a decidedly unorthodox therapist starts working on his arm, and Charlie begins to dream again . . . especially now that the Boston Red Sox have lost two starting pitchers and seen their lead over the Yankees sliced in half. Can Charlie make it back to the bigs? Will he ever convince his ex-wife to take him seriously again? Will his son (the . . . well, never mind who he is-we've got to save something) even acknowledge his existence? Can the Red Sox--dare we say it?--shake off the collective curses of the Bambino, the Buckner, and Bucky-expletive-Dent?
