Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
AKA, the original Mr. Met. Reilly passed away last Dec. 30 at the age of 83. According to the obituary in Jan. 7 issue of The New York Times by Richard Sandomir Mr. Reilly was working in the Mets’ ticket office when two team executives asked him to breathe corporeal life into Mr. Met, who […]
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Whoopsie! In my Dec. 10 “Baseball Best Seller” entry, I made a Fred Merkle-type boner. I inadvertently credited Lincoln Mitchell — author of such non-fiction titles as The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976–1992; San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock and a Third-Place Baseball Team; and Baseball Goes West: The […]
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when articles like appear: Which baseball movie has the greatest Hollywood ending? Where to begin? How about the choice of three films for this panel discussion between Ian Browne, Anthony Castrovince, Alyson Footer (who served as the piece’s writer and moderator), Adam McCalvy, and Manny Randhawa. In what appears to be a series of such […]
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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 was looking back over the site and came across a number of drafts I pretty much completed but failed to post. Since we’re talking about baseball books and pop culture — which are timeless — and not the latest news, I thought I would make a mini-series of sorts. Unfortunately, some of the reference […]
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“Hey, that’s Crash Davis. He’s played in more towns than I have. Helluva guy — real different. I actually saw him read a book without pictures once” Max Patkin in Bull Durham It may not be a Crash Davis project, but here’s announcing the Noah Syndergaard Book Club (via The New York Times). At least […]
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Because you can keep a wine bottle on your bookshelf… I had the opportunity to speak with Dusty Baker for my next book project. I already knew the Houston Astros manager owned an energy company in his native California. What I did not know is that he’s also a vintner (or at least he owns […]
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It’s a Wonderful Life is one of my favorite movies. I’ll watch the uninterrupted version whenever its on, although I can’t stand it when NBC airs it, turning it into a three hour snoozefest in order to get their current batch of TV series stars yakking about what the movie means to them, not to […]
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In addition to baseball, I’ve always enjoyed me some good science fiction. Right now the missus and I are watching Expanse (Netflix) on the recommendation of some friends. After two episodes, it doesn’t seem to be in my wheelhouse, but they urge us to keep going, comparing it with Battlestar Gallactica (also not really my […]
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Note: 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 writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one […]
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According to a translation site, the header above (pronounced “fushigina hōkō e korogaru”) is the Japanese equivalent of “down the rabbit hole,” which is where I fell after finding a story about Shinji Mizushima, “author of the popular Japanese ‘Dokaben‘ baseball manga series, [who] decided to end his career as a manga artist Tuesday, his […]
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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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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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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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Because you can put an autograph in a frame on your bookshelf. Not really sure what MLB means by limiting players signing autographs. One of the insidious parts of this disease is that you can be harboring it without knowing it. So if they really want to be cautious, they shouldn’t have any autographs, at […]
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Sort 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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The Baseball Maniac’s Almanac: The Absolutely, Positively, and Without Question Greatest Book of Facts, Figures, and Astonishing Lists Ever Compiled, edited by Bert Randolph Sugar with Ken Samelson (Sports Publishing, 2019) I love almanacs. Where else can you find so much information — useful or trivial, interesting or no — in one volume? The Almanac […]
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About the World Series. Haven’t done one of these in a long time. I think I even neglected to write when Keith Hernandez was a guest back when his latest memoir — I’m Keith Hernandez: A Memoir — was published last year. But with the Washington Nationals winning the first championship for the nation’s capital […]
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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
If they can put a man on the moon… (the problems with Amazon)
February 22, 2020
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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