Baseball Manager

From the award-winning baseball writer and coauthor of Ninety Percent Mental, an unprecedented look at the job of Major League Baseball managers—showing how they shape the game, and how the ever-changing game shapes them. Skipper takes on an ambitious Moneyball-esque premise: a deep dive into...

What if Studs Terkel wrote a book with Bill James? You'd have a book on what it's really like to make a living in the world of baseball. For everyone who ever dreamed of making their love of baseball into their vocation, Working at the Ballpark will provide a view at their lives that might have been, with interviews with more than 50 people who make a living in major league baseball. Each is asked the same questions: What is your job? How did you get into this line of work? What does this job mean to you?

The 15 major-league managers interviewed in The Man in the Dugout represent six decades of baseball - men like Joe McCarthy of the New York Yankees and Walter Alston of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Each oral history, steeped in nostalgia and confidentiality, is a record of the triumphs and defeats of the man carrying the prime responsibility of a multimillion-dollar franchise. Here the manager is revealed as a strategist, tactician, peacemaker, politician, ego-soother, and builder of self-confidence.