The 1984 Tigers were one the greatest teams in baseball history. After jumping off to a record 35-5 start, they shook off a determined Toronto team to win the division title, swept Kansas City for the American League Championship, and handily defeated San Diego in a five-game World Series. 
 In doing so, they became just the third team in major league history to lead wire to wire and win the World Series—joining the elite of the elite: the '27 Yankees of Babe Ruth and the '55 Dodgers. 
 And now veteran sportscaster Eli Zaret recreates this extraordinary season in exhilarating detail—from incredible start, through midseason doubts, and on to a dominant postseason finish. Best of all, Zaret provides, for the first time, insights into the season from the key players themselves. The real behind-the-scenes story. 
 We hear from Kirk Gibson, whose home run blast against Goose Gossage clinched the final game of the World Series, about how he pulled himself out of the worst year of his life to play such a key role in the '84 season. And from Jack Morris, the moody leader of the Tigers' pitching corps, who jumped off to an amazing start, fell into an inexplicable personal and professional slump, and then rose to the occasion to help Detroit put the series away. 
 We share the season's intimate details and previously untold moments with Alan Trammell, Willie Hernandez, Chet Lemon, and many more key players. And we get the inside scoop from the maestro himself, Sparky Anderson, who melded a disparate collection of personalities and styles into a unified team, and a winning machine. 
 Zaret shows how General Manager Bill Lajoie completed a brilliant 10-year construction project in assembling the right talent. How critical the performance of the bit players and the role players was in the Tigers' championship season. And how players suddenly cast into the spotlight performed like they never had before and never would again. Zaret also lets us listen in on the negotiations between players and their penny-pinching, old-school CEO Jim Campbell. 
 Fans of any sport will love Zaret's book because it reveals the strategies and inner workings of how a championship is won. Baseball fans will savor this insightful look at a team that has become an icon of the sport. And Tigers fans, who have had to endure much since '84, will be ecstatic in reliving that championship feeling.

'84: The Last of the Great Tigers--Untold Stories From an Amazing Season

Sports & Outdoors

Zaret, Eli

Baseball

Crofton Creek Press

Blue Collar Blueprint: How the Pistons Constructed Their Championship Formula

Malloy

From being the only 30-game winner in more than 70 years to having the Gambino crime family order a hit for your murder, Denny McLain has surely seen it all: RICO charges from the U.S. government to touring the country as a popular musician playing on national TV and the Las Vegas strip before becoming a close jail-house friend to John Gotti Jr. I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect allows the former All-Star pitcher to share his cautionary tale with generations of baseball. In 1968, McLain set the baseball world on fire by being the first pitcher to win at least 30 games since Dizzy Dean 34 years earlier. But just two years later he was banned from the game for half a season, traded away to the laughing-stock Washington Senators where he entered into a never-ending battle with baseball icon Ted Williams. By 1972, he was a retired star, hustling games of golf. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was in and out of prison for charges including racketeering, loan-sharking, extortion, cocaine possession, and fraud before being included in wide-sweeping RICO charges that tried to connect him to Gotti and the violent underworld of the mafia. In this moving autobiography, McLain reveals how his desire for excitement and attention led directly to his downfall from being a popular public image and cost him his marriage, which has since been reconciled and remarried.

I Told You I Wasn't Perfect

McLain, Denny

Biographies

Triumph Books

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