Looks at the life and career of Casey Stengel, from his days as a player on the Brooklyn Dodgers to his string of pennants and World Series wins as manager of the New York Yankees.

One of the most endearing of American heroes, Casey Stengel guided the New York Yankees to ten pennants in twelve seasons. Here is the brilliant manager stripped naked-the person underneath all the clowning, mugging, and double-talking. Robert Creamer shows us Casey at twenty-two, famous from his very first day in the big leagues. We see Casey's playing career fall apart as he is traded, shunted to last-place teams, hampered by injuries, considered...

"No one sees baseball like Joe Maddon. He sees it through his trademark glasses and irrepressible wit. Raised in the "shot-and-beer" town of Hazleton, Pa., and forged by 15 years in the minors, Maddon over 19 seasons in Tampa Bay, Chicago and Anaheim has become one of the most successful, most colorful, and most quoted managers in Major League Baseball. He is a workplace culture expert, having engineered two of the most stunning turnarounds in the...

Leo Durocher (1906-1991) was baseball's all-time leading cocky, flamboyant, and galvanizing character, casting a shadow across several eras, from the time of Babe Ruth to the Space Age Astrodome, from Prohibition through the Vietnam War. For more than forty years, he was at the forefront of the game, with a Zelig-like ability to be present as a player or manager for some of the greatest teams and defining baseball moments of the twentieth century....

Mike Matheny was just forty-one when he succeeded the legendary Tony La Russa as manger of the St. Louis Cardinals in 2012. He enjoyed immediate success as a manager, leading the Cards to the postseason three times in his first three years. But he is perhaps as well known for his tough-love philosophy, famously expressed in a frankly worded letter he wrote to the parents of a Little League team he coached. That letter contained his throwback beliefs...

"In the Halberstam tradition of capturing a season through its unforgettable figures, They Bled Blue is a sprawling, mad tale of excess and exuberance, the likes of which could only have occurred in that place, at that time. That it culminated in an unlikely World Series win-during a campaign split by the longest player strike in baseball history-is not even the most interesting thing about this team. The Dodgers were led by the garrulous Tommy Lasorda-part...