Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
At Home Plate posted this review of Tom Dunkel’s Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line. Upshot: “This book is the story of those men and it’s a great story. One worthy of being read over and over by fans who truly love the game and understand what we all lost during [...]
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And so am I. Jury duty and still trying to get my day job done is taking up my blogging time, much to my (and I hope, to a degree) your dismay. But I wanted to pay tribute to one of my favorite sports photographers, Ozzie Sweet, who passed away Wednesday at the age of [...]
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This goes back aways, but David Roth wrote about R.A. Dickey, mold-breaker for the concept of the cliched athlete, in the July 9 issue of New Yorker. More recently, Will Leitch offers these thoughts about the Mets in a “reasons to love New York” retrospective. Bruce Markusen at The Hardball Times posted this piece about [...]
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Arcadia Publishers, which produces paperbacks of photos of specific themes, is offering “bundles of books” for $30. Of particular interest to RKBB readers are the New York Baseball Bargain Bundle and the U.S. Baseball Bargain Bundle. The former features New York Sluggers: The First 75 Years and “four other surprise books” which are, obviously, not [...]
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Sports Illustrated recently came out with a list of their choices for the 100 greatest sports photos of all time. Baseball Nation’s Grant Brisbee was ambitious enough to cull the baseball shots which includes, as ranked: 99. Willie Mays, “The Catch” 94. Greg Olsen, “Ow, my head and neck!” 89. Juan Marichal, “Windup” 83. Yogi [...]
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♦ The Washington Post published this piece on Tony La Russa’s memoir, One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season. ♦ Better late than never: It seems the Seattle Post-Intelligencer finally got around to posting a review of Zack Hample’s 2007 publication, Watching Baseball Smarter: [...]
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♦ Tom Hoffarth’s latest in his 30 days/30 books series: Dodgers from Coast to Coast: The Official Visual History of the Dodgers. ♦The Los Angeles Times also ran this “straight” review on the Dodgers’ book.
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Several new titles arrived over the past week including: Before the Curse: The Chicago Cubs’ Glory Years, 1870-1945, by Randy Roberts and Carson Cunningham A People’s History of Baseball, by Mitchell Nathanson Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, by Paul Dickson (Of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary fame) The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball [...]
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My daughter, Rachel, an intern at Clear Channel, created this gallery of, ahem, “Baseball hotties” for the Z100 website.
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Back in the day (i.e., when I was a kid), taking pictures was a pretty big deal. Cameras used real film (kids, ask your parents), either in roles for SLR cameras that a) cost money, and b) had to be developed, which cost more money. If you had an “instamatic” camera, then you had to [...]
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The new year marks the commemoration a few prominent events which serve as the topic for several recently-released and forthcoming books. As the oldest Major League ballpark still in use, Fenway Park is the subject of a great deal of nostalgia and mystique (and no, Curt Shilling, these are not dancers in a New York [...]
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Eephus League posted a link to a series of Life Magazine’s best baseball photos, so I’m extending the gesture. Paying it forward, as it were.
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From MLB/SBNation.
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From the Baseball-Reference.com Bullpen: San Francisco’s Gaylord Perry connects for his first Major League homer, to beat the Dodgers, 7 – 3. The previous year, Giants’ manager Alvin Dark had remarked that “They’ll put a man on the moon before he hits a home run.” Perry’s homer comes about 20 minutes after the club house [...]
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My annual Spring Baseball Book Roundup was recently posted to the Bookreporter.com site. Titles include: 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella Uppity: My Untold Story About the Games People Play The House That Ruth Built: A New Stadium, the [...]
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The National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, located in Commack, NY, opened an exhibit in December in celebration of Sandy Koufax’s 75th birthday. The paintings, photographs, and other bric-a-brac have been assembled by Alan Freedman, director of the Hall into a beautiful paperback volume, Sandy Koufax: 32 at 75. Fans of baseball/sports art will immediately [...]
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The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Feb 4, at 10 a.m. Title Rank General Baseball Prospectus 2011 1 Baseball America 2011 Prospect Handbook: The 2011 Expert Guide to Baseball Prospects and MLB Organization Rankings (Baseball America Prospect Handbook) 2 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis (Kindle [...]
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The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Jan. 21 at 9 p.m. Title Rank General Baseball Prospectus 2011 1 Baseball America 2011 Prospect Handbook: The 2011 Expert Guide to Baseball Prospects and MLB Organization Rankings (Baseball America Prospect Handbook) 2 The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, by [...]
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Craig Biggio, the last player to join the 3,000-hit club, turns 45 today. The book on him: Biggio: The Final Game. Honorary mention: Scott Hatteberg. Who’s he, you ask? Basically, Hatteberg — who walked 562 and struck out just 503 times and had a .361 OBP over his 14-year career — was one of the [...]
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is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com.
In my "day job," I'm the features and sports editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper. I'm also the editor of the Bibliography Committee Newsletter for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
I did a piece on the award-winning cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
Congratulations to Charles P. of Long Island City, NY, winner of the most recent Facebook Fan drawing, The Might Have Been: A Novel
Next up: Long Shot
Tell your friends!
My article on the later biographies of Babe Ruth appears in
My article on the Mets' 1969 post-season appears in
What I just read:
Southern League: A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South's Most Compelling Pennant Race
Well-intentioned, but somewhat disappointing in delivery of the intended message. B-.
What I'm reading now
Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age
First Impressions: Too soon to tell.
What I'm RE-reading now
Play for a Kingdom
What's next:
Gil Hodges: The Brooklyn Bums, the Miracle Mets, and the Extraordinary Life of a Baseball Legend
Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game
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