Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Apologies, chaverim. If I had my act together, this would have been done before Channuka. Oh, well. You know what they say about the road to hell. Similarly, if I was still working in the Jewish media, this would have been a pretty major story. Ryan Lavarnway, a prototypical backup catcher, enjoyed a ten-year career […]
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Used to be around this time of year you could look forward to the baseball annuals from Street & Smith, Athlon, Lindy’s, and a host of other magazine publishers. Of course, back in the day there were many others put out by the likes of The Sporting News, Major League Baseball, Bill Mazeroski, with Baseball […]
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I am always excited to see a new book come out on Jewish baseball. It was a main part of my job as sports editor of the New Jersey Jewish News to seek out anything to refute the canard that “members of the tribe” are bookish and unathletic. So imagine my delight when I learned of […]
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A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast […]
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If you’re studying math, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life. Steve Martin Consider me screwed. I read pretty much anything about baseball, save for kids’ books and most fiction, […]
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A zissen Pesach to all my landsmen baseball friends out there. From the site Make your model or family seders a home run with The Baseball Haggadah, connecting two rites of spring, baseball and the story of Passover. By holding up the Exodus story next to the concept of a beloved national pastime, Rabbi Forman casts […]
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Headnote: I’ve decided to bow to the times and include separate lists for e-books and audio books. Be aware that while many titles also appear in print versions, pretty much anyone can produce an e-book these days, so I’m not going to comment at all about the quality. As far as the audio goes, I’m […]
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If you’re looking for the perfect gift for the Jewish sports fan, you can’t do much better than The Jewish Baseball Card Book, by Bob Wechsler. Based on the popular Jewish card sets produced by Martin Abramowitz (who helped on the project along with Peter McDonald), this coffee table edition features photos and brief stories […]
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Happy Thanksgiving, y’all. By now most of you are familiar with my caveats, so I’ll just mention them briefly: The list includes only print editions of books; calendars (even though Amazon includes them on their lists), no audiobooks (as much as I enjoy them), and no kindle (because I’m old school). Second, since the rankings […]
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NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on […]
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I guess there are a lot of fans there who think Divine Provenance is to credit for their their team winning the pennant. John Sexton, author of Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game, weighs in with the Chicago Tribune.
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NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on […]
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In yesterday’s post about “Baseball and books — What’s the connection?”, a reader asked about the painting I used as a graphic element. Here’s what I found out thanks to the good people at lds.org, the website for the Latter Day Saints. Their response to my on-line query: “Young Joseph Fielding Smith Studying the Book […]
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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
