Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
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The new normal in baseball literature is to publish something — anything — that pushes baseball analytics as the only logical way to assemble a team. Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game may may have been the first “official” book to address the concept, but there have been several since its […]
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The Baseball Hall of Fame will shortly announce who, if any, of the gents on the current ballot will be measured for a new plaque. Forget the animus towards the players — I have never witnessed the bad feelings that have been expressed recently between the writers. Most of the latest comes towards Murray Chass, […]
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There’s a line in the film version of The Natural in which the following exchange occurs between Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) and the unctuous sportswriter Max Mercy (Robert Duvall): Hobbs: Did you ever play ball, Max? Mercy: No, never have. But I make it a little more fun to watch, you see. And after today, […]
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Today’s newspapers are rife with news about the passing of Marvin Miller, who died yesterday at the age of 95. The pieces fall mostly into three general categories: straight-ahead obituaries, op-ed pieces discussing his importance to the sports world, and items on Miller’s continued snub for induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame, as exemplified in […]
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They’ve been talking about a Mike Piazza memoir for a few years now. Looks like the time is almost at hand for its release by Simon & Schuster. But exactly when is still up in the air. Pizza promised a “tell-all,” but would that include material about suspected performance enhancing drug usage? According to Chass’ […]
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Former New York Times baseball writer Murray Chass is among a group of five Americans who will be inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, located in Netanya, Israel. Chass, a resident of Fair Lawn, is a recipient of the Spink Award, given for contributions to baseball writing, and was installed in the […]
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Former NY Times baseball writer Murray Chass takes on the subject of anonymous sources in his most recent column. This issue came up in baseball books a few times this year, most notably Serena Roberts’ biography on Alex Rodriguez. Critics took her to task for using A.S. and dubious testimonials about the ballplayer’s use of […]
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Use PED, of course. That’s one of the topics of Murray Chass’s Aug. 16 column, in he he ponders the advisability of a Mike Piazza auto-bio. I quote, at length: Several months ago I heard that Piazza may be doing a book. The publisher, Simon & Schuster, I was told, had signed a contract for […]
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More on the decision by MLB to cease the printed publication of the Red and Green Books. Murray Chass wrote about this awhile ago, and sure enough, it’s become a generational thing. David Appelman of FanGraphs.com: … as a younger person who uses the Internet (and sometimes even writes about baseball), I actually do have […]
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Or Green. As in the American and National Leagues’ ‘s Red and Green Book, respectively. The annual publications were conceived as tools for executives and the media, full of all kinds of unusual information, such as the origin of team logos and color schemes, name pronunciations, and of course, all manner of stats. They supplemented […]
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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
This is why Murray Chass dislikes bloggers
October 15, 2013
One of my go-to on-line haunts is Baseball Nation. It’s a combination of in-depth analyses, funny/off-beat features, and general bric-a-brac about the national pastime and its place in pop-cultural. Yesterday this intriguing title caught my eye: “The least surprising mystery of all time,” by Jason Brannon. (If it’s not surprising, can it still qualify as […]
Tagged as: Baseball Nation, Jason Brannon, Murray Chass, Rob Neyer
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