Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
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The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of 10 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 8. Title Rank General The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, by Jane Leavy 1 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis 2 Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams, […]
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Can’t believe the season is almost over. The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of 2 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 1. Title Rank General Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams, by John Updike 1 The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, by Jane Leavy 2 Moneyball: […]
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The recent program at the Burbank Library seems to have sparked national attention to Bouton’s classic. Here are a few more items for your consideration: Our friend, Tom Hoffarth penned this nice wrap-up of the event. “It’s not a stretch to think today of Bouton as a J.D. Sallinger of sports literature,” he writes. “In […]
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The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Noon on Friday, Sept. 27. Title Rank General Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis 1 Ball Four, by Jim Bouton 2 The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime by Jason Turbow and Michael […]
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Herewith the final schedule for BALL FOUR TURNS FORTY, presented by The Baseball Reliquary at the Burbank Central Library, on Saturday, Sept. 18. If you go, tell Jim that I said “Hey.” 11:00 am — 12:30 pm Introduction by Terry Cannon and Jon Leonoudakis Opening remarks by Jim Bouton Panel discussion with Q&A on Ball […]
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In the recent entry on the Jim Bouton interview, I wrote about the book’s inclusion in a list of the New York Public Library’s Books of the Century. I mistakenly referred to it as a list of the top 100 books. In fact, the total is closer to 175. Bouton’s contribution to literature is included […]
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I can still picture it in my mind: Reading Ball Four during summer camp days back in 1970. In fact I still have that original volume in my library. So it’s shocking to me that it’s been 40 years since Jim Bouton’s watershed memoir was published. Bouton was quite generous with his time in speaking […]
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The Hardball Cooperative now features a “book club” to discuss those watershed titles on the national pastime. This month, they take up the classic Ball Four. A few excerpts from the essay by James Bailey. Ball Four changed both baseball and sportswriting, as Bouton went where most had feared to tread. He named names. He […]
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Well not me, specifically, but to this guy, Seth Magalaner, the “sports literature examiner” at examiner.com, one of the hyper-local websites. Magalaner has also written on some other baseball books, including Jeff Pearlman’s The Rocket that Fell to Earth and Allan Barra’s Berra bio (say that five times fast).
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Don Amore from the Hartford Courant published this piece, pursuant to all the hubbub about the release yesterday of the Rodriguez biography. I have absolutely no quibble with his selection of Ball Four as his pick for the Babe Ruth/Hank Aaron/Cy Young of baseball books. But when he includes Spakry Lyle’s The Bronx Zoo among […]
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A blast from the past courtesy of the Lansing State Journal. Upshot: …[O]ne book is not responsible for the seismic shift in sports media during the past 40 years, or even the past five years. But it’s part of it, and Bouton’s book is among the first insights that the game, the strategy and the […]
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Not the first — that honor went to Jim Brosnan — but perhaps the best of the genre he tackled, Bouton turns 69 today. “The Bulldog” enjoyed a couple of good years for the New York Yankees, winning 20 games in1963 and 18 more in 1964, the last good year the team had for more […]
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From Jim Caple’s Page 2 column on ESPN.com: Rereading “Ball Four” every spring…is an annual requirement — sort of like pitchers’ fundamental drills, only a lot more fun.
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PinstripesPA reviews Haunted Baseball by Dan Gordon and Mickey Bradley, while Tailgatecrashers post this piece about The New Ballgame: Baseball Statistics for the Casual Fan, by Glenn Guzzo. As the days go by and more attention is paid to the use of amphetamines and other drugs associated with easing ADD/ADHD, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four will […]
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Of late, I have wondered about the ethics of friendship. I’ve been watching The Wire, a cop /newspaper drama in which people do questionable things for ostensibly noble purposes. In one episode, a superior officer chastises a patrolman for an unquestionably wrong act against a citizen who honked his horn at a crime scene. Although […]
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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
Bits and pieces
September 17, 2010
Spurred on by the hubbub around the 40th anniversary of Ball Four, Delia Cabe, who hosts the Creative Type blog at Boston.com, had this piece about the best baseball books, not just from her POV, but from those of local celebrities and others. And as the Baseball Reliquary program heralding that anniversary beckons, look for […]
Tagged as: Ball Four, Negro league baseball, Rube Foster
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