Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
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If it seems there have been a lot of Conversations with Jon Leonoudakis, it’s because he’s constantly putting out new product. In this case, it’s Ball Four Turns 40, a documentary about that watershed memoir by the irrepressible Jim Bouton. In our latest chat, we talk about the gathering of the Baseball Reliquary in 2011 […]
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Tom Hoffarth and I are kindred spirits. For more than a decade, the former sports columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News produced, among many other things, the great feature “30 books in 30 days”; here’s just one entry on it from the Bookshelf. As you can see, these were more than just book reviews, […]
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I’ve said it time and again here: I am not a huge fan of posting about baseball fiction. I just feel unqualified to opine on the details since I lack the educational background to parse about it with any degree of confidence or even intelligence. That said, when I learned about the topic of The […]
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It wasn’t until I decided to ask Ira Berkow on to discuss his latest book, Baseball’s Best Ever: A Half Century of Covering Hall of Famers, that I remembered that he wrote the foreword to The Jewish Olympics: The History of the Maccabiah Games (which violates one of my own rules for titles: it should […]
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When my daughter decided she wanted to go into photography as a career, I was worried. Since everyone who has a smartphone is a photographer now, how are you going to make any money off that? But not everyone who has the ability to use a camera phone has the talent to make their shots […]
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He blinded me with science! Never a strong suit of mine in school, and normally I would stay away from any book that would remind me of that failing, but Will Carroll‘s latest book does have baseball in the title so… Carroll has long been the go-to guy for all things injury-related (his Twitter handle […]
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Somewhere in the attic, among all the boxes of baseball material, are a stack of scorecards and programs I’ve used over the years. The first one was from a Mets-Pirates game in 1966. It has the unsophisticated scrawls you’d expect from a nine-year-old who hadn’t yet learned the “right way” to record what was going […]
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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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Hard to believe it’s been 75 years since Jackie Robinson’s debut. I sometimes think about the veterans of World War II and how old they have to be to have served back in the early 1940s; Robinson would have been 102 this year. Where does the time go? There have probably been more books written […]
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There’s a first time for everything. For example, this is the first time we’ve had a poet on for a Conversation. It’s the same reasoning I have for not doing much fiction on the blog: I just don’t feel qualified to address the genre. My experience with poetry is limited to doggerel like “Casey at […]
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I had hoped by now the whole nasty Covid business would be behind us. I was wrong. If there’s anything good that’s come out of this for baseball readers, it’s the Pandemic Baseball Book Club. The PBBC has given a platform to authors who missed out on the opportunities a normal year would have offered […]
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Sometimes I am surprised at how long I’ve been doing this, a fact that came to my attention when I reconnected with Scott Brick, an award-winning audiobook narrator with whom I first chatted in 2009. According to his bio, Brick “has narrated almost 900 audiobooks including titles such as: Jurassic Park, the Jack Reacher series, Alexander Hamilton, […]
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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
The Bookshelf Conversation #153: Paul Aron
October 17, 2022
Kudos to Paul Aron and the decision to name his newest project The Lineup: Ten Books That Changed Baseball. No superlatives, no grandiose claims, but a much more modest approach. And, indeed, these are books that not only changed the sport, but in some cases — as Aron explains both within the pages and our conversation […]
Tagged as: baseball books, Paul Aron
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