Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Note: I started this entry quite a while ago but I doubt another story like this has been posted since then, so… It’s not enough that there are lists of the greatest baseball movies of all time. Now there’s one on “Ranking the 25 best baseball movie-quotes of all time” (my emphasis). Just like any […]
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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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The CASEY Award hits the “big 4-oh” Anniversary in 2022. “It seems only appropriate that we should wind up with such an outstanding field of contenders for the CASEY in this milestone year,” said Spitball Editor-in-Chief Mike Shannon. “I think the CASEYs demonstrated long ago that no other sport produces great literature, year in and […]
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Hard to believe this is already the end of the first half of the year. Where did the time go? 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 […]
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Herewith another list of “great” baseball movies, this one from Collider.com. Different strokes for different folks. The list includes a few odd choices that rarely show up when thinking about “great” flicks, including the Disney saccharin remake of Angels in the Outfield and Rookie of the Year.
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Because what else is there to do, baseball-wise, besides read and watch movies? Via ScreenRant: According to Rotten Tomatoes, these are the top ten baseball flics. Here’s the criteria: It should be noted that only certified fresh movies are included, as some baseball films have high ratings but only a handful of reviews. Definition of […]
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Sometimes I get grief when I complain about the quality of baseball films. My friends say I’m being too hard because I know and expect too much. In the words of that great philosopher, Steve Martin But I came across this on Youtube and thought it was pretty cool: Joc Pederson, Justin Turner, and Ferris, […]
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Was tooling around the dial the other day (well, I guess TVs don’t actually have dials anymore) and came across one of my favorite “poppy seed” movies, A League of Their Own. (Amazingly, I can’t find the definition of a PSM online, but to my mind, it’s one of those films that you’ll watch whenever […]
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Both gave inaccurate accounts of what happened during a ballgame. Neil Simon, one of the great playwrights of our time, passed away yesterday at the age of 91. His baseball connection? This scene from the film version of The Odd Couple, which was released in 1968. By the way, that play was pure fiction: the […]
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That’s the story from the Hollywood Reporter which reports that Amazon is working on the project. The retail giant/streaming service is developing a TV series based on Penny Marshall’s Tom Hanks and Geena Davis feature, A League of Their Own. Mozart in the Jungle‘s Will Graham and Broad City‘s Abbi Jacobson will co-write and executive produce […]
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I looked at a lot of video clips when writing about the recent passing of John Mahoney, the actor who played Kid Gleason, manager of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, in the film version of Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out. I was specifically looking for the courtroom scene but couldn’t find it. I did find […]
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I always get a kick out of finding reviews of baseball books in unlikely places. In this case, it’s actually kind of a natural, since this title cross multiple genres. Even though it touts itself as “The Essential Guide to Movies of the ’60s and ’70s,” CinemaRetro offers this piece on Richard Sandomir’s The Pride […]
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No, not the 1951 feature film starring Kirk Douglas, William Bendix, and Eleanor Parker… Recently I posted about a scene from The FBI Story, a 1959 flick starring that thespian baseball standout Jimmy Stewart, which depicted a banner headline from the Washington Post announcing a Babe Ruth Home run. Jim Meier, the retired librarian for The […]
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So I was watching yet another Jimmy Stewart movie, The FBI Story (1959), and my “baseballadar” picked up on this in a scene: Note the headline, ostensibly from the Washington Post: “Babe Ruth Hits 15th Home Run.” Now I can’t enlarge it enough to catch the date, but it seems a bit far-fetched that the […]
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Looking for baseball pics on Netflix? Type this in after you sign in and it will take you right there: https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/12339 You’re welcome.
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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
