Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
From libraryjournal.com, two brief reviews of Faithful to Fenway: Believing in Boston, Baseball, and America’s Most Beloved Ballpark and Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans. Interesting to note that these are two of the most historically snake-bitten teams when it comes to the post-season. (Thanks to reader Greg Spira.)
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When it was first published, Ballet in the Dirt: The Golden Age of Baseball, a collection of Neil Leifer’s photographs which had a limited run of 1,000 copies, went for $400; towards the end, it was selling for $700. The 65-year-old Leifer, who has spent a good portion of his shooting for Sports Illustrate, is […]
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Michael Marotta of the Boston Herald offers a few suggestions of good reads as the season approaches, including: Far From Home – Latino Baseball Players in America, by Tim Wendel and Jose Luis Villegas (National Geographic Society) The Bill James Gold Mine 2008, by Bill James (ACTA Sports) Facing Clemens: Hitters on Hitting Against Baseball’s […]
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You know the season is just around the corner when the baseball annuals hit the newsstands. When I first developed an interest for the game, back in the mid 1960s, Street and Smith‘s — Likes Topps baseball cards — was the only game in town. Since then — again like Topps — other publications have […]
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There seems to be a preponderance of “old-timer” biographies these days. Profiles of Eddie Collins, Branch Rickey, Sal Maglie, and Chief Bender have shown up in bookstores in recent months. Add to that list Sam Rice: A Biography of the Washington Senators Hall of Famer, written by former (Munster, IN) Times sportswriter Jeff Carroll. His […]
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From the The Burlington (NC) Times News: Mark Cryan, the former general manager of the Burlington Indians, has written “Cradle of the Game: Baseball & Ballparks in North Carolina.” August Publications of Minneapolis is publishing the 400-page volume, which an August spokesman said is a comprehensive work “exploring minor-league and leading college ballparks” throughout the […]
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GB/LP have put out some interesting, off-beat baseball books and they continue that tradition this year. The Ballad of Billy & George, by Phil Pepe picks up on the recent ESPN miniseries, The Bronx is Burning, which highlighted the tempestuous relationship between Yankees manager Billy Martin and owner Billy Martin. If reality was anything like […]
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The following is based on an article by Bob Cottrell, Margaret Heilbrun, Paul Kaplan (no relation), and Gilles Renaud from the Feb. 1 issue of Library Journal My comments appear in parenthesis; the writers’ in the indented paragraphs. The Code: Baseball’s Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-at-Your- Own-Risk Code of Conflict, by Ross Bernstein. Triumph. March […]
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Peter Morris, who was twice won SABR’s prestigious Seymour Award, comes out with this new book, subtitled “An Informal History of baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843-1970.” Due out in March from Ivan R. Dee, it’s yet another look at the origins of the game as it moved from an amateur pastime to what would become big […]
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Lots of “Bits and Pieces” With little beside the steroids business going on during this off-season, there’s lots of time to read and many bloggers are posting reviews, including. Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong, Cobb: A Biography, and Is This a Great Game or What, all from […]
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Based on Bill Veeck’s quashed attempt to buy the Philadelphia A’s and stock it with players from the Negro Leagues, The End of Baseball features a number of real-life characters, including Veeck, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis (who sought to keep the game lily-white); columnist Walter Winchell (the Matt Drudge of his day?); and J. Edgar […]
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José Canseco, the former major league slugger and admitted steroid user who exposed other players in his 2005 best-selling book “Juiced,” offered to keep a Detroit Tigers outfielder “clear” in his next book if the player invested money in a film project Canseco was promoting, according to a person in baseball with knowledge of 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
