We've got baseball on the brain. Wrapping up this week is the 2013 World Series, marking one hundred years since the first game was played in what became the modern World Series. That tournament pitted the Boston Red Sox against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Today it's the Red Sox again, playing against the St. Louis Cardinals. We'll keep our own leanings to ourselves, and instead ask that you take a moment to turn your attention to another great moment in baseball history: Reggie Jackson's rise to greatness.

The Pennsylvania-born high school and college athlete worked his way through the minors to the majors, and though some say the rest is history, the story is so much more than that of a sports great sliding into the sunset. In his new memoir, Becoming Mr. October, Reggie Jackson shares the story of two of the years pivotal in his life as a professional athlete and as a man.

In the spring of 1977, Jackson was considered to be the best player in the history of the Oakland A’s, and had been recruited by New York Yankees manager George Steinbrenner, for a five-year contracted term amounting to pay in the sum of nearly three million dollars. Unfortunately, in spite of all of this, Jackson was about to enter one of the loneliest times of his life.

Listen to Jackson kick off his story in an excerpt from his audiobook below.