Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
As New Year’s rolls around, one of things you can still count on these days are those “end of the year” recaps. You know, “The Top 10 in…” or “The Best of…” fill-in-the-blank. However, after going through numerous such lists, I was dismayed at how few sports titles, let alone baseball, were included, given the […]
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And maybe get a spiritual visit from the former tenant. From the New York Post: “Late sports scribe Roger Angell’s former NYC co-op asks $3M”
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Hard to believe it’s been a month since my last entry. Life, you know? But here’s hoping for a better year ahead. Because people have shorter attention spans these days, there has become a designation for articles that readers just can handle. The shorthand is TLDR: “too long, didn’t read.” That’s a shame. I liken it […]
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I posted this to my other blog, The Worried Journalist, this morning. If they can do crossovers on TV and in the comics, I don’t know why I can’t share the entry about Arnold Hano, Don Larsen, Ian Anderson, and serendipity.
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Or WHIP? Or some other 21st century stat? Recently picked up the first baseball magazine of the year — Lindy’s Sports Baseball 2021 Preview — and feel it’s already useless. Predictions are a main feature of most of these publications. Problem is, because they are prepared and released weeks before the season starts, they cannot […]
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So why can’t the folks at Amazon devise a search function that returns the results asked for? I have been asked to submit nominations for a major baseball book award and wanted a quick reminder of what came out in 2020. Previously, I would simply do an advanced search in the books category with the […]
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My baseball library is divided into three main sections: the attic, my basement office, and the rest of the house. I was cleaning the attic yesterday, because what else is there to do? While trying to cull the herd, putting things in boxes to eventually give away or ::shudder:: throw out, I can across a […]
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but I was tickled to be included in Bookreporter.com’s “Bookaccino Live” zoom meeting last week with other long-time contributors to the site as it celebrated its 24th anniversary. Not exactly sure how long I’ve been associated with this wonderful group, but it’s gotta be at least 18 years. Since then I’ve done scores of reviews, […]
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There’s only one baseball audiobook on my weekly best-seller roundup but while I was putting the entry together I could help but notice: Out of the top 100 audiobooks, 16 have a very similar design, save for the Jenner book in which the author is not facing the camera head on.
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The Pandemic Baseball Book Club has just announced a giveaway contest with il premio di tutti i premi. (That’s “the prize of all prizes” for you non-Italian speakers out there. Yes, I’m pretentious.) Just posted on Facebook today so I thought I would share it. The lucky winner of “The Pandemic Baseball Book Club Grand […]
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Still unsure of what lies ahead for the 2020 season. All it takes is for one team to explode with cases of Covid-19. God forbid it ever comes to this. So on that happy note, humbly submitted for your amusement.
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Saturday mornings usually meant sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal. Yada, yada, yada. Very sweet, very nostalgic. Well, it’s Saturday morning and I thought I’d use the occasion to offer a few items about our favorite sport. The first one, “Abner, the Baseball,” is at once charming, creepy, and ahead […]
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Going down the rabbit hole while researching the previous entry on M*A*S*H, I came across a few more interesting items about baseball and episodic television from ME-TV. Submitted for your amusement: 6 forgotten TV shows about baseball that all struck out Can you name the TV show by its baseball episode? Star Trek in baseball, […]
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A photo from 1918, during the Spanish Flu pandemic. More on baseball and the corona virus: Baseball has survived pandemics before, and for desperate fans, that counts (Washington Post) How Babe Ruth and baseball confronted another major pandemic (Pinstripe Alley) Required reading: September 1918: War, Plague, and the World Series, by Skip Desjardin
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why can’t Amazon searches be more specific? Every few months, I look for new titles that are coming out in the near future. For the life of me, I don’t understand why I can’t tailor my search to exclude topics I don’t want, specifically kids’ lit and “romance” novels that somehow feature baseball in their […]
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If you follow me on Facebook, you know where I stand on the current political situation: I hate it. It’s turned a lot of Americans into an “us-versus-them” with no compunction towards kindness and tolerance. But I have tried to keep this blog politics-free. Or at least it was until CNN posted this piece explaining […]
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There’s been some chatter lately about changing the MLB postseason structure. Here’s the synposis: MLB is considering a move in which each league would have three division winners and four wild-card teams making the postseason starting in 2022, sources said. The best team in the league would receive a bye into the division series. The […]
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Well, the good thing about late December and the beginning of winter is that by the time next week’s list rolls around, the days will be getting longer. Wouldn’t it make sense to have the shortest day in the middle of the season, and the longest somewhere in August? But I digress… Note: The Amazon […]
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Because you can keep a donut on your bookshelf (but not for too long). Since I mentioned my work at Trader Joe’s in the previous post and I am working on a piece from Sunday’s New York Times in their special section “How the ‘Babe Ruth of Cookies’ Brought Us a Dozen Dazzling Holiday Recipes,” I […]
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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
Such stuff as dreams are made on
July 14, 2020
With apologies to Shakespeare. I received this link from a high school classmate today about a treasure trove of baseball cards found in the attic of a recently deceased 97-year-old. (Thanks, Terry!) I have fantasies about some friend or colleague telling me a loved one wants to just get rid of a bunch of old […]
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