Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Aces The Last Season on the Mound with the Oakland A's Big Three -- Tim Hudson Mark Mulder and Barry Aces: The Last Season on the Mound with the Oakland A's Big Three: Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito. San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller From the speedy rise of the Big Three to their stunning breakup, Urban's book says it all."" - John Shea, National baseball Writer, San Francisco Chronicle During the 2004 season, each of Oakland's Big Three aces had something to prove. Tim Hudson was determined to demonstrate his recovery from a recurring injury. Barry Zito had to show the world that after a ho-hum 2003, his 2002 Cy Young Award was not a fluke. Mark Mulder missed the 203 playoffs entirely with a stress fracture, but the . Read More. Aces: The Last Season on the Mound with the Oakland A's Big Three -- Tim Hudson Mark Mulder and Barry Zito by Mychael Urban. San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller. From the speedy rise of the Big Three to their stunning breakup, Urban's book says it all." - John Shea, National baseball Writer, San Francisco Chronicle. During the 2004 season, each of Oakland's Big Three aces had something to prove. Tim Hudson was determined to demonstrate his recovery from a recurring injury. Barry Zito had to show the world that after a ho-hum 2003, his 2002 Cy Young Award was not a fluke. Mark Mulder missed the 203 playoffs entirely with a stress fracture, but the way he saw it, he simply needed to be himself-the natural-born pitcher. Given unprecedented access to the Big Three , Mychael Urban recreates their tumultuous season through their eyes. he explores the nuts and bolts of major league pitching, examining each player's unique approach to this craft while revealing how three very different personalities cope with the demands, rewards, and challenges of sports stardom. Now with a new afterword on the 2005 season. Urban traces the fortunes of the Big Three after Hudson was sent to Atlanta and Mulder to St. Louis, trades which held the dramatic promise of them being reunited again-as opponents-in the playoffs. "Written with great color, style, humor, and grace, Aces takes readers on a captivating ride." - Mike Silver, Sports Illustrated. "Mychael Urban's book is a fabulous read. This is hardly just a baseball book. It's about life, and he tremendous burden each pitcher carried while trying to lead the Oakland A's to the playoffs. I absolutely loved it." - Bob Nightengale, Senor Writer/Columnist, USA Today Sports Weekly. Aces: The Last Season on the Mound with the Oakland A's Big Three -- Tim Hudson Mark Mulder and Barry Zito by Mychael Urban. An Amazon book-subject search for "baseball" returns 6,844 hits. Google for the narrower "Babe Ruth book" and you get 2,870. Occasional requests for baseball book recommendations in Internet chat rooms launch endless streams of responses, all unique. With this overwhelming backdrop, compile and present a list of the 10 best baseball books ever? Sheer folly. The field is too broad. Furthermore, there is no definitive list; everyone's differs. However, that also means there are no "wrong" answers. Only choices, then let the debates begin. All baseball books perform a list of common services; the "best" just do it best -- inform, amuse, educate, inspire, thrill, analyze, connect, reflect, transport us back to favorite places and people, provide perspective on significant eras, not all of them bright. So, the current hot read, Jose Canseco's "Juiced," may belong on future such lists. It will never be the literary equal of, for instance, any of the tomes that so richly chronicle baseball's trek away from segregation. But backward glances may value it as the study of another bleak culture baseball had to move beyond. In this Top 10, we made it a point to hit on several genres. We didn't omit the obvious. But we also strived to include some obscure gems -- never-known, or long-forgotten -- worthy of discovery, or re-discovery. The Teammates David Halberstam/2003 Gist: In October 2001, Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky embarked on a 1,300-mile drive to the deathbed of a friend and former Boston teammate -- Ted Williams. It became a trip to self-discovery and nostalgia, too. Glimpse: "Ted was dying, and the idea for the final trip, driving down to Florida to see him one last time, was Dominic's. It was in early October 2001, and Dominic was not eager to get aboard a plane and fly to Florida so soon after the September 11 terrorist attack, and his wife, Emily, most decidedly did not like the idea of him driving there all by himself. "Pesky loved the idea and he too quickly signed on, and in the way that these things are decided without being formally decided, it was agreed that Dominic and Dick (Flavin) would share the driving and John, 82, would sit in the backseat. As a kind of penance, Pesky agreed not to smoke his requisite two cigars a day." Baseball's Great Experiment Jules Tygiel/1983 Gist: Detailed and comprehensive narrative of the integration of America's game, and of America, that only began with Jackie Robinson and did not conclude until 1959 with Pumpsie Green and the Boston Red Sox. Glimpse: [Setup -- In the Montreal Royals' International League opener against the Jersey Giants on April 18, 1946, Robinson becomes the first black man in Organized Baseball in the 20th century. First inning, one out. Robinson settles in for his first at-bat.] "Standing at home plate, Jackie Robinson avoided looking at the spectators, 'for fear I would see only Negroes applauding -- that the white fans would be sitting stony-faced or yelling epithets.' The capacity crowd responded with a polite, if unenthusiastic welcome. "Robinson's knees felt rubbery; his palms, he recalled, seemed 'too moist to grip the bat.' Warren Sandell, a promising young left-hander, opposed him on the mound. For five pitches Robinson did not swing and the count ran to three and two. On the next pitch, Robinson hit a bouncing ball to the shortstop, who easily retired him at first base. Robinson returned to the dugout accompanied by another round of applause. He had broken the ice." The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract Bill James/1985 Gist: The groundbreaking -- and not nearly as dry as the egghead "sabermetrics" label would have you believe -- tome that ushered in a new way of looking at, and interpreting, baseball statistics. Last rites for long-unchallenged views and traditions. Glimpse: "Tinker, Evers, and Chance were not really great ballplayers, they merely happened to win a huge number of games. The definition of a great ballplayer is a ballplayer who helps his team to win a lot of games. "I go back and forth on this issue . it seems to me, you have to deal somehow with the phenomenal success of their team. This team won more games, over any period of years, than the Yankees with Ruth and Gehrig, than the Dodgers with Robinson, Reese, Snider, and Campy, more games with the Reds with Bench, Morgan, Rose, and Concepcion -- more games than anybody." Shoeless Joe W.P. Kinsella/1982 Gist: Broader and even more spine-tingling than the film rendition ("Field of Dreams"), the novel includes more compelling characters and plot detours. But the moral is the same. Forgiveness and reconciliation; first offenses and second chances. Glimpse: "Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robin's-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, I was sitting on the verandah of my farm home in eastern Iowa when a voice very clearly said to me, 'If you build it, he will come.' "He, of course, was Shoeless Joe Jackson. "Was it really a voice I heard? Or was it perhaps something inside me making a statement that I did not hear with my ears but with my heart? Why should I want to follow this command? But as I ask, I already know the answer. I count the loves in my life: Annie, Karin, Iowa, Baseball. The great god Baseball." Ball Four Jim Bouton/1970 Gist: The pioneer fly-on-the-clubhouse-wall diary. The Reds' Jim Brosnan ("The Long Season" and "Pennant Race") kissed-and-told a decade earlier, but Bouton's platform had more impact; he was a New York Yankee. Glimpse: "I didn't hear from (Ralph) Houk again until two weeks before spring training, when he came up another thousand, to $16,500. This was definitely final. He'd talked to (Dan) Topping, called him on his boat, ship to shore. Very definitely final. "I said it wasn't final for me, I wanted $20,000. "'Well, you can't make twenty,' Houk said. 'We never double contracts. It's a rule.' "It's a rule he made up right there, I'd bet." The Boys of Summer Roger Kahn/1971 Gist: A loving, tender and pragmatic -- all at the same time -- look at a time and place unlike any other. Brooklyn and its Bums. A travel down Flatbush Avenue and back in time, as the Men of Autumn recall their time in the sun. Glimpse: "There had been time neither to pack nor to sort thoughts. Quite suddenly, after twenty-four sheltered, aimless, wounding, dreamy, heedless years, spent in the Borough of Brooklyn, I was going forth to cover the Dodgers. "Too many games, and the loneliness, the emphatic, crowded loneliness of the itinerant, ravage fantasy.