When it came to football in the 1930s, the college sport was king. But in 1933, former boxer and minor league baseball player Art Rooney, who had quarterbacked the squad at Duquesne University, purchased a team for Pittsburgh for $2,500. Thus began the legacy we know as “Steeler Nation.”

At the time, no one could have imagined that the Pirates, as they were originally named, would become a treasured possession for Pittsburghers. For the first 40 years, the franchise was a national joke. With only one playoff performance—a 21–0 defeat at the hands of the Philadelphia Eagles for the eastern division title in 1947—highlights were minimal for a team that regularly found itself at the bottom of the standings.

The remote farming community of Murdock, Nebraska, seemed to be the least likely setting for one of the heartland’s most ruthless and bloody double murders in decades. In fact, the little town had gone more than a century without a single homicide. But on the night of Easter 2006, Wayne and Sharmon Stock were brutally murdered in their home. The murders garnered sensational frontpage headlines and drew immediate statewide attention. Practically everybody around Murdock was filled with fear, panic, and outrage. Who killed Wayne and Sharmon Stock? What was the motive? The Stocks were the essence of Nebraska’s all-American farm family, self-made, God-fearing, and of high moral character. Barely a week into this double murder investigation, two arrests brought a sense of relief to the victims’ family and to local residents. The case appeared to fall neatly into place when a tiny speck of murder victim Wayne Stock’s blood appeared in the alleged getaway car.

The Toledo Mud Hens—a farm team for the Detroit Tigers—once had a budding pitcher named Ed Crankshaft. At least that’s how partners in cartooning, writer Tom Batiuk and artist Chuck Ayers, scripted the main character in Crankshaft. This enjoyable volume collects all of Crankshaft’s baseball-themed exploits. Fans will enjoy revisiting Crankshaft’s reminisces about his minor league pitching career and his comic attempts to recapture his youthful successes on the diamond.

To his neighbors on Imperial Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, Anthony Sowell was a quiet and helpful former Marine who played chess and hosted summer barbeques in his front yard. But there was a dark side to Sowell—and a horrific secret inside his house. In mid-2007, Crystal Dozier, 38, made plans to visit Sowell. She was never seen again. Over the next two years, ten more Cleveland women disappeared. Their families filed missing persons reports. Police say their search efforts were hampered by the women’s transient lifestyles. But the families say police considered their loved ones “disposable” and didn’t take their disappearances seriously.

Did the Mad Butcher of Cleveland also strike in Pennsylvania?

From 1934 to 1938, Cleveland, Ohio, was racked by a classic battle between good and evil. On one side was the city’s safety director, Eliot Ness. On the other was a nameless phantom dubbed the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” who littered the inner city with the remains of decapitated and dismembered corpses. Never caught or even officially identified, the Butcher simply faded into history, leaving behind a frightening legend that both haunts and fascinates Cleveland to this day. In 2001 the Kent State University Press published James Jessen Badal’s In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders, the first serious, book-length treatment of this dark chapter in true crime history. Though Murder Has No Tongue: The Lost Victim of Cleveland’s Mad Butcher—a detailed study of the arrest and mysterious death of Frank Dolezal, the only man ever charged in the killings—followed in 2010.

This beautiful coffee-table book features forty twentieth-century Indians legends, beginning with the era when they were the Cleveland Blues. Schneider has divided the Indians’ history into quartercentury periods, selecting ten players from each as stars of this historic franchise. Illustrator Tom Denny, known for his dynamic and creative images in oil, watercolor, and mixed media, has created portraits and action scenes for each of the forty iconic players. Napoleon Lajoie, Tris Speaker, and Jim Bagby Sr. from 1901–1925; Mel Harder, Bob Feller, and Lou Boudreau from 1926–1950; Larry Doby, Rocky Colavito, and Bob Lemon from 1951–1975; and Omar Vizquel, Jim Thome, and Kenny Lofton from 1976–2000 are some of the forty outstanding players selected. Also included are highlights of each player’s career, biographical information, and career statistics.

The team has played nearly one thousand games over the past eight decades, and The Browns Bible tells the tale of each one. Through individual game stories and box scores, it encapsulates every victory, every defeat, every touchdown from 1946 to the present. The most comprehensive account of the Cleveland Browns ever written, The Browns Bible narrates the legend of this cherished franchise season by season and week by week as it gradually wove itself into the fabric of the city’s culture—starting with its dominance of the All-America Football Conference and continuing through the glory years of the 1950s, the Kardiac Kids and Dog Pound eras, and the franchise’s rebirth in the twenty-first century.

Until the surprising 2012 campaign, a generation of Steel City baseball fans had hungered for the Pirates to be involved in an actual pennant race, a goal that even the most diehard could not have imagined. There was a time that it wasn’t a far-off dream, but instead an annual right. From 1970 through 1979, Pittsburgh won six eastern division crowns and two national championships. While impressive, the 1970s were only the second-best decade in franchise history. Classic Bucs looks back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the indisputable best decade of the Pittsburgh Pirates, when a young and brash team captured four senior circuit titles and their initial World Series in 1909.

Speak English! The Rise of Latinos in Baseball chronicles how much— and how little—has changed since the first Latino played in the big leagues in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the next century, the Alous, Vic Power, and Rico Carty worked to earn their place in the game amid taunts and ridicule. Today, even established players and stars may be told to speak English in clubhouses—eliciting cringes or shrugs from individuals who are seemingly still hurting.

Meet Me at Ray’s celebrates more than seventy-five successful years (and counting) of Ray’s Place, a restaurant and bar located near the Kent State University campus in Kent, Ohio. Once referred to as the place “where the hustlers meet to hustle the hustlers,” Ray’s Place has survived decades of trends, changes, and events. Hundreds of students have worked there, thousands of customers have dined there, and millions of glasses have been raised there.