Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Congrats to Arnold Hano, recently elected to the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals, the national organization’s equivalent to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Don Newcombe and Bo Jackson will join Hano for this year’s “induction.” They will be formally enshrined in a public ceremony on Sunday, July 17, at the Donald R. Wright Auditorium […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The late sports radio pioneer Graham McNamee has been named the recipient of the 2016 Ford Frick award for excellence in broadcasting. From the Hall of Fame press release: Graham McNamee, whose national play-by-play of the World Series in the earliest days of radio transformed the one-time opera singer into a household name, has been […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The longlist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing To honor a nonfiction book on the subject of sports published in 2015 was announced today. Winner gets $5,000. Of the ten books on the list, four are baseball titles including: The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Congrats to Willie Mays and the late Yogi Berra, two of the most recent recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. You can watch the CSPAN coverage of the event here. From NBCNews.com: New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra, who died in September at the age of 90, was awarded the medal posthumously…. Celebrating Berra’s […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
At least you won’t have the ridiculous dramatic pauses with camera zoom-ins and throbbing music as the audience awaits the name of the winner. (DWTS, I’m looking at you.) The editors of Spitball Magazine announced the nine finalists for the coveted CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year. The titles include: The Betrayal: […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Spitball Magazine posted this on Linked-In, so I figure it’s fair to reports here: CASEY Award Call for 2015 Baseball Books. All authors and publishers of baseball books published in 2015 should make sure that their titles are included in the CASEY Award (Best Baseball Books of the Year) Nominating process, underway now. For more information, […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Books have been written about the use of baseball as an imperialist tool by the United States. We send people to foreign countries; they bring baseball with them, and pretty soon the residents of those foreign have embraced the game to a degree even more enthusiastic than back in the good ole U.S.A. Case in […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Since I posted the first of these on a Thursday, which is known on social media as a time of reflection, I thought to make it a regular thing under this rubric. These are kind of fun; it’s like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re gonna get. (Actually, I never understood […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Just finished thumbing through A History of Baseball in 100 Objects, the latest baseball release by Josh Leventhal, author of several other well-produced baseball titles. The objects included herein represent the game since before its “formal” recognized inception in the mid 1800s (and please don’t write about the exact DOB of the game). But the […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Just like the movies, this is the baseball book awards season. On Monday, I wrote about Kostya Kennedy’s biography Pete Rose: An American Dilemma, winning Spitball Magazine’s Casey award. Now the other shoe has dropped. Mover and Shaker: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers, & Baseball’s Westward Expansion, by past SABR President Andy McCue was selected as […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine announced the winner of the 2014 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year is Kostya Kennedy for Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. The showing turned in by Rose was especially impressive given the outstanding field of finalists, which was extended by two books over the normal total of […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Because you can certainly put trophies on your bookshelf. Ian Kinsler lost to Boston Red Sox Dustin Pedroia for the American League Gold Glove Award for second basemen. He did, however, pick up the Wilson Defensive Player of the Year award. The Gold Gloves are award by Rawlings, a sporting goods company and one of […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
From the editors of Spitball Magazine, here are the finalists for the 2014 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year: Brooks: The Biography of Brooks Robinson, by Doug Wilson The Chalmers Race: Ty Cobb, Napoleon Lajoie, and the Controversial 1910 Batting Title that Became a National Obsession, by Rick Huhn The Fight of […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The Passover holidays have played havoc with my schedule, so there’s a lot to catch up on. First off, can you remember those Bicentennial Minutes that CBS used to broadcast in the months leading up to the big celebration? Well, Dan Epstein, author of the new Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Herschel Cobb (right) accepts the Casey Award, presented annually by Spitball magazine for the best baseball book of the year. Cobb is the author of Heart of a Tiger: Growing Up With My Grandfather, Ty Cobb. Presenting the award at the March 9 banquet in Cincinnati is Mike Shannon, editor of Spitball. Also in attendance […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
It’s a win-win situation: I get to de-clutter the house and please the missus and some luck follower of RKBB gets a free book. Here are the rules: The fifth person to post a comment on the site (not Facebook) wins. Only related to the overall scope of the blog, please; no “My team’s great, […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Heart of a Tiger: Growing Up with My Grandfather, Ty Cobb by Herschel Cobb, has been chosen as winner of the 2013 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year by Spitball Magazine. From the Spitball post: The searing, sometimes horrifying, story about how Ty Cobb rescued his grandson from Herschel’s abusive father becomes in […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
UPDATE: It seems only fitting that The New Yorker post a piece of appreciation, and here it is, with”as a holiday bonus…a kind of mini-anthology, a taste of the best of a marvellous writer and man.” * * * The “dean” of baseball writing was named recipient of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
is available on Amazon.com,
In my most recent "day job," I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted another blog. Busy, busy, busy.
I did a profile piece on the award-winning cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
My article on the later biographies of Babe Ruth appears in
My article on the Mets’ 1969 postseason appears in
Profiles of several Jewish baseball figures appear in
