Indiana-Born Major League Baseball Players

Indiana boasts a rich baseball tradition, with 10 native sons enshrined in Cooperstown. This biographical dictionary provides a close look at the lives of all 364 Hoosier big leaguers, who include: New York City's first baseball superstar; the first rookie pitcher to win three games in a World Series; the man who caught most of Cy Young's record 511 career wins; one of the game's first star relievers; the player who held the record for consecutive games played before Lou Gehrig; an obscure infielder mentioned in Charles Schulz's ""Peanuts"" comic strip; baseball's only one-legged pitcher; Indiana's first Mr. Basketball, who became one of baseball's greatest pinch-hitters; the first African American to play for the Cincinnati Reds; the only pitcher to throw a perfect game in the World Series; the skipper of the 1969 'Miracle Mets'; the pitcher for whom a ground-breaking surgical procedure is named; and the only two men to have played in both the World Series and the Final Four of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Pete Cava became a full-time author after a 25-year career in Olympic sports. His articles and essays on Olympic sports and baseball have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. He serves as a correspondent for the wire service Agence France Presse. A veteran of five Olympics (two as a reporter, three as a network television researcher), he is a member of Track and Field Writers of America, the Association of Track and Field Statisticians and the International Society of Olympic Historians. He has served on public relations committees of the International Association of Athletics Federations and the U.S. Olympic Committee. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.