Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
With the dawn of the season, news coverage is picking up substantially. Several topics constitute the bulk of the early buzz: The final season of Yankee and Shea Stadiums. There are several new and revised titles about The House That Ruth Built; there are none, as of this moment, specifically about Shea. Go figure. Anniversaries […]
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The Story of Take Me Out to the Ball Game by Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson, and Tim Wiles. Hal Leonard, 2008. This year marks the centennial of what baseball fans believe to be the true “national anthem” and this trio of authors have done the ditty proud. Baseball’s Greatest Hit is an “everything you always […]
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As appears on SportsAgentblog.com. Up-shot: I think that a major hurdle that I had to get past was the unorthodox style of authors Larry Burke and Peter Thomas Fornatale. Before opening Change Up, I had never read a book that was 95% narrated by other people. The stories do a little jumping all over the […]
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Yeah, I know what I said, but here are a few fallout items of note on the Canseco project. The most “impressive” of the bunch comes from the mind of Pat Jordan on Deadspin.com, who started the whole ballplayer-as-writer business with his 1960 books A Short Season and The Pennant Race. He comes to the […]
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Dan Gordon, editor of Your Brain on Cubs, a collection of essays about what being a fan does to your head, is the subject of this podcast interview that appears on ScientificAmerican.com. http://www.sciam.com/podcast/podcast.mp3?e_id=E7C749BE-E982-2B21-2AADBDF1AF968B99Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
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I’m not going to spend a lot of time rehashing all the news that comes out about Vindicated. They’re pretty much rehashings of the same story, Rodriguez this, Ordonez that, blah, blah, blah. Here’s a piece from today’s New York Times; it will probably be the last from the Bookshelf until the actual reviews start […]
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From Kevin’s Meandering Mind, this review about regional baseball.
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Baseball’s real anthem celebrates its centennial this year, a fact marked by the new book, Baseball’s Greatest Hit: The Story of Take Me Out to the Ball Game, by Tim Wiles, Andy Strasberg and Bob Thomson as well as Allen Barra’s March 22 story in The Wall Street Journal.
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In 1951, the Dodgers sign a 21-year lease with the City of Vero Beach for use of their spring training site. That arrangement ended this spring. (Thanks to nationalpastime.com) The Amazon Report on Dodgertown: The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown: 60 Years of Baseball in Vero Beach Dodgertown (CA) (Images of Baseball)
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As Opening Day approaches, the warm thoughts of afternoons in the sun will be obliterated by the cloud that is the steroids scandal. Jose Canseco, our guest “meteorologist,” is back with his sequel. The March 17 Publisher’s Weekly offers this feature on how the buzz about Canesco’s latest literary contribution is is stealing the thunder […]
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Acta Sports, 2008 When Bill James came out with his Baseball Abstracts in the early 1980s, I thought I had discovered forbidden fruit. For this first time, here were cogent numbers accompanied by scintillating commentary, the best of both world’s for a fan. Each team’s major players got their due, as James offered his “scouting […]
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Whenever a book — especially a sports book — includes the words “best” (or “worst”), “ranking”, or “forever,” you know the author is looking to start an argument. Take John Roengren, for example. His new title on the 1973 season carries the “forever” brand. Granted 1973 was an eventful season. The Mets, still mourning the […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
In a former life, I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted an award-winning bog about Jews and Sports.
I did a profile piece on the legendary cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was very generous in immortalizing me in this caricature.
My article on Sandy Koufax in the 1965 World Series appears in
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
