Grinders
Baseball's Intrepid Infantry
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Narrated by:
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Mike Capps
About this listen
Grinders: Baseball’s Intrepid Infantry tells the tales of the game's unheralded foot soldiers who took the hard-knocks road, bouncing between the show and obscurity, never quite achieving their dreams, all for a chance to play the game they love.
On a brutally humid summer night in 1960, nine-year-old Mike Capps was sitting with his grandfather in the rickety, mosquito-infested Burnett Field across the Trinity River from the twinkling lights of the concrete and steel towers of downtown Dallas.
When he glanced at his grandfather’s scoresheet, something caught his attention. His grandfather had made check marks alongside names of six or seven players for both clubs.
“I also want you to pay attention to the names I have checked here,” his grandfather said. “These guys will travel back and forth between Dallas and Kansas City and Minneapolis and Boston all summer. You’ll even see their names in the box scores. They aren’t stars, but they are the engine that drives baseball’s bus."
“Drives baseball’s bus, drives baseball’s bus?” The comment buried itself in Capps’ psyche for decades, and, 60 years later, formed the basic idea for this book. What his grandfather called baseball’s “engine” we now call “grinders”. The back-and-forth roller-coaster ride between professional baseball’s minor leagues and its nirvana, Major League Baseball, remains perplexingly difficult for a multitude of great players and their families.
Players like Deacon Jones, Brian Mazone, and Lorenzo Bundy battled their way to a chance in the big leagues and hung on as long as they could. Some shared the love of the game with their sons, who became grinders in their own right. Grinders fill every roster at every level, plugging away year after year. Without their grit, determination, and persistence, there would be no stars. These are their stories.
©2022 Mike Capps (P)2022 Mike CappsListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
The World Series is the most enduring showcase in American team sports. It’s the place where legends are made, where celebration and devastation can hinge on a fly ball off a foul pole or a grounder beneath a first baseman’s glove. And there’s no one better to bring this rich history to life than New York Times national baseball columnist Tyler Kepner, whose bestselling book about pitching, K, was lauded as “Michelangelo explaining the brush strokes on the Sistine Chapel” by Newsday.
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Excellent!
- By DavidF on 09-09-24
By: Tyler Kepner
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Game Six
- Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime
- By: Mark Frost
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Mark Frost takes listeners back to the 1975 World Series in this thrilling account of the greatest baseball game ever played. The Reds and Red Sox endured three soggy days of inactivity to reach game six. But all that downtime could not prepare them for what happened when the skies finally cleared.
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For the love of Baseball
- By Al on 03-23-10
By: Mark Frost
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Summer of '68
- The Season That Changed Baseball - and America - Forever
- By: Tim Wendel
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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From the beginning, ’68 was a season rocked by national tragedy and sweeping change. Opening Day was postponed and later played in the shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. That summer, as the pennant races were heating up, the assassination of Robert Kennedy was later followed by rioting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But even as tensions boiled over and violence spilled into the streets, something remarkable was happening in major league ballparks across the country. Pitchers were dominating like never before, and with records falling and shut-outs mounting, many began hailing ’68 as “The Year of the Pitcher".
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Detroit Upsets St. Louis in 1968 World Series.
- By Matthew Tsien on 05-01-18
By: Tim Wendel
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The Year of the Pitcher
- Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age
- By: Sridhar Pappu
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The Year of the Pitcher is the story of the remarkable 1968 baseball season, which culminated in one of the greatest World Series contests ever, with the Detroit Tigers coming back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Cardinals in Game Seven of the World Series. In 1968, two remarkable pitchers would dominate the game as well as the broadsheets. One was black, the other white. Bob Gibson, together with the St. Louis Cardinals, embodied an entire generation's hope for integration at a heated moment in American history. Denny McLain, his adversary, was a crass self-promoter.
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Misleading Title
- By Paul on 01-25-19
By: Sridhar Pappu
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The Last Folk Hero
- The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson
- By: Jeff Pearlman
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 22 hrs
- Unabridged
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From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. Stadiums struggled to contain him. Clocks failed to capture his speed. His strength was legendary. His power unmatched. Video game makers turned him into an invincible character—and they were dead-on. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat.
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If you are a sports fan and over 35 years old, you have to listen/read this. Awesome!
- By betty sammons on 06-29-23
By: Jeff Pearlman
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Long Shot
- By: Mike Piazza, Lonnie Wheeler
- Narrated by: Holter Graham, Mike Piazza
- Length: 15 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Mike Piazza was selected by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 62nd round of the 1988 baseball draft as a "courtesy pick". The Dodgers never expected him to play for them - or anyone else. Mike had other ideas. Overcoming his detractors, he became the National League Rookie of the Year in 1993, broke the record for season batting average by a catcher, holds the record for career home runs at his position, and was selected as an All Star 12 times. Mike was groomed for baseball success by his ambitious, self-made father in Pennsylvania, a classic father-son American-dream story.
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I only thought i knew the Mike Piazza story
- By James on 03-24-13
By: Mike Piazza, and others
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108 Stitches
- Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game
- By: Ron Darling, Daniel Paisner - contributor
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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This is New York Times bestselling author and Emmy-nominated broadcaster Ron Darling's 108 baseball anecdotes that connect America’s game to the men who played it. Darling has played with or reported on just about everybody who has put on a uniform since 1983, and they in turn have played with or reported on just about everybody who put on a uniform in a previous generation. Like the 108 stitches on a baseball, Darling's experiences are interwoven with every athlete who has ever played, every coach or manager, and every fan.
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Meh
- By Amazon Customer on 04-13-19
By: Ron Darling, and others
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Bums
- An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers
- By: Peter Golenbock
- Narrated by: Raymond Todd
- Length: 19 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Before the team headed to Los Angeles in 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers were one of the most colorful and beloved teams in baseball. In Bums, best-selling author Peter Golenbock has compiled a fascinating oral history of the Ebbets Field heroes with recollections from former players, writers, front-office executives, and faithful fans.
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A MUST for the true Dodgers or Giants fan!!
- By Karen on 02-25-07
By: Peter Golenbock
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1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever
- By: Bill Madden
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Jackie Robinson heroically broke the color barrier in 1947. But how—and, in practice, when—did the integration of the sport actually occur? Bill Madden shows that baseball’s famous black experiment” did not truly succeed until the coming of age of Willie Mays and the emergence of some star players—Larry Doby, Hank Aaron, and Ernie Banks—in 1954. And as a relevant backdrop off the field, it was in May of that year that the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, that segregation be outlawed in America’s public schools.
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Acumen bugaboo
- By steve finkelstein on 04-25-21
By: Bill Madden
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The Journey Home
- My Life in Pinstripes
- By: Jorge Posada, Gary Brozek
- Narrated by: Lorenzo Irizarry
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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For 17 seasons the name Jorge Posada was synonymous with New York Yankees baseball. A fixture behind home plate throughout the Yankees biggest successes, Jorge became the Yankees' star catcher almost immediately upon his arrival, and in the years that followed, his accomplishments, work ethic, and leadership established him as one of the greatest Yankees ever to put on the uniform.
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Jorge who?!!
- By Jacques on 11-30-22
By: Jorge Posada, and others
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The Chicago Cubs
- Story of a Curse
- By: Rich Cohen
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the Chicago Cubs have always been more than a team: they've been the protagonists of a King Arthur epic, in search of the Holy Grail that is winning the World Series. A chronicle of the last few miraculous seasons as experienced through the prism of Cubs history, The Chicago Cubs tracks the famous curse, which was placed on the team in 1945 by the infamous owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, who was ejected from Wrigley Field when he tried to bring his goat into the grandstand for the fifth game of the World Series.
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just listen and it all happens again
- By Z. Kuhn on 10-28-17
By: Rich Cohen
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Dollar Sign on the Muscle
- The World of Baseball Scouting
- By: Kevin Kerrane
- Narrated by: Patrick Kerrane
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Humorous case histories and profiles of great baseball scouts accompany a discussion of the trade secrets of baseball scouts, the economics of scouting, player development, and the history of the profession. In a new epilogue Kevin Kerrane explores the world of baseball scouting in the late 1990s.
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Good for diehards, but dated and riddled w errors
- By Kindle Customer on 03-02-17
By: Kevin Kerrane