Download Free Backstop Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Backstop and write the review.

It's often said that catcher is the most important, most demanding defensive position in baseball. This view explains why so many light-hitting catchers have enjoyed long--and by all accounts successful--major league careers. Yet arguments over the all-time greats invariably privilege offensive standouts, and even among these players batting statistics are more likely than fielding numbers to affect ranking. So what, historically, have been the expectations for major league catchers, and who stands as the greatest in a more balanced view of offensive and defensive contributions? In Part I of this book, the history of catching and catchers is discussed in detail, with attention to the most celebrated players of each era. In Part II, the author employs sabermetric formulas to rank the 50 greatest catchers since 1920, when changes to the rules, the parks, and the ball dramatically changed the way baseball was played. Also included is a chapter on catchers of the 19th century, deadball era, and Negro Leagues, whose career statistics are either incomplete, inaccurate, or produced under markedly different playing conditions and rules.
You know Backstop. He plays for any team in any city in America with a major league ball club. You cheer him when he delivers, and boo him when he doesn't. In what could be his last game after 14 years in the major leagues-the seventh game of the World Series-Backstop chronicles his rookie season, takes the reader to Chicago where he finds romance, and reveals the heartbreak he endured in the aftermath of an adulterous affair. Fellow Michigan writer and author of Landscape with Fragmented Figures Jeff Vande Zande writes of Backstop: "J. Conrad Guest offers an entertaining and instructive journey into both major league baseball and major league matters of the heart." While Rachael Perry, also a Michigan writer, says, "Baseball, like love, is a game of errors and regrets. Pop-outs, ground-outs, strike-outs. A bad swing, a bad throw, a bad hop. But what captivates us most is the possibility of the next at-bat, of the chance for a rally, of an unlikely clutch play that suddenly changes the stakes. This is where J. Conrad Guest meets us in Backstop: in this beautiful, hopeful place closest to our hearts, where we play for the love of the game, and we love with everything we have."
'Funny, wise, entertaining and illuminating, this book is one of the best things to come out of the Brexit saga' FINTAN O'TOOLE. 'Read this absorbing book to understand why, since 2016, we have been playing with fire. There is no longer any excuse for ignorance' MISHA GLENNY. Northern Ireland's frontier with the South has been an invisible line since the peace agreement of 1998. Now the battle over the UK's decision to leave the EU risks turning it into a hard border. Yet few people in the rest of Britain (or Ireland) know anything much about this most volatile part of an increasingly disunited Kingdom. This book was written in the feverish summer of 2019, in the aftermath of the 'New' IRA's murder of Lyra McKee, with the fear and anxiety of Brexit looming over a region in which paramilitary forces are still carrying out beatings, and worse, even as the numbers of tourists drawn by the Titanic and Game of Thrones continue to grow. The power-sharing government created by the Good Friday Agreement has not met – a bleak record in a long-running farce – in over 1,000 days. If it wasn't for the wonderful weather you might wonder why anyone stayed there at all. Glenn Patterson brings a lifetime's engagement with Northern Ireland and a brilliant novelist's eye to an informative, darkly entertaining portrait of a fragile country. Welcome to Backstop Land.