Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Just finished reading Mike Piazza’s Long Shot for a review that will appear Friday on Bookreporter.com. The quick react: is it great? No. Certainly nothing like R.A Dickey’s emotionally charged Wherever I Wind Up. Piazza grew up in an affluent environment, which seems to engender some ill will of its own, silver spoon and all […]
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One wonders why Simon & Schuster held back the release of Mike Pizza’s new memoir, Long Shot. From Saturday’s NY Times article, written by David Waldstein: “rumors began to circulate about why the release…was being pushed back to February, a month after the voting would be concluded and the final results tabulated. Would his memoir […]
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Former Red Sox skipper Terry Francona’s self-named memoir debuts on the NY Times‘ Best Seller list at number 2. Gregory Cowles included it in the print edition of the Sunday Book Review’s “TBR: Inside the List” column. Unfortunately, it’s not on-line as of this writing so you’re own your own, since it’s too long for […]
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Murray Chass weighs in on Terry Francona’s new memoir The Red Sox Years (written by Dan Shaughnessy). Russ Smith contributed this review of the same book on Baseball Musings. Speaking about managerial memoirs that raise an eyebrow, Mike Reuther, author the baseball novels Return to Dead City and Nothing Down, posts the occasional book review. […]
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Forget the first robin; this is my measuring stick. I’m savoring this. Every year I promise to study these annuals, to really get a better grip on who’s who and what’s what. This time I mean it. One of the first things I look at every year is the list of milestones, a holdover from […]
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The bad news? Publishers Weekly published their list of “The Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2013” and 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die didn’t make it. The good news? No other sports books made the list (schadenfreude).
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I love a good behind-the-scenes story, so I’m looking forward to Life From The Press Box: Recollections of a Sportswriter, by Jim Street, who has covered the Oakland As, Seattle Mariners, and San Francisco Giants, among non-baseball sports. The book got a nice write-up from T.R. Sullivan at MLB.com, who states, “This baseball book is […]
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Former manager Terry Francona will release his new memoir Francona: The Red Sox Years next week. Book publicity seems to be like movie trailers. The excerpts include the most exciting bits, which maybe just just a tiny fraction of the overall project. An excerpt of the book will appear in this week’s Sports Illustrated. The […]
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Some recent news about Jewish authors and their baseball output. Lawrence Ruttman publishes American Jews and America’s Game:Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball, from University of Nebraska Press, this spring. UNP is the same outfit that’s releasing my (shameless plug) 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. I met Ruttman, a New […]
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Or “Methinks he doth protest too much.” I feel sorry for a lot of today’s celebrities, especially athletes. After years of (self?) denial, Lance Armstrong admitted he used performance enhancing drugs. Ballplayer after ballplayer swears on a stack of bibles that he’s clean, only to have the evidence turn out to prove him “misstating.” The […]
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Dec. 22 marked the 70 anniversary of an advertisement than ran in The New York Times and several other newspapers calling on men and women of German ancestry to join in a campaign denouncing the Nazi regime. The advertisement, which was sponsored by the World Jewish Congress, began At this season in which we celebrate […]
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Several months ago I posted this about 42, the forthcoming biopic about Jackie Robinson. As we get closer to the scheduled April 12 release date expect to see more stories, like this one from SB Nation’s Beyond the Box Score and this from Baseball Musings. In the trailer, we see Christopher Meloni doing a pretty […]
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Larry Ruttman, a fellow UNP author, is about to publish American Jews and America’s Game: Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball, a collection of interviews. James Bailey, my main”competitor,” posted this abbreviated list of what he considers some classic of baseball fiction, include some obscure titles not associated with the superlative, wish as Season […]
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To be honest, I’m not much of a gamer. I tried a previous version of MLB for the Wii, but the instructions were sparse. I guess the younger generation just has the gene for these things, so they don’t need a manual.
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Happy new year, everybody. Best wishes for a healthy and contented 2013. Now that the writing and production part of 501 is over, I hope to bring more fun interviews, features, and reviews. AND… New Year, new book, new blog. I just launched the stand-alone site for 501. Please visit it and like it on […]
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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
