Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
A Celebration of Baseball’s Greats In Stories and Images, The Complete Roster of Inductees, by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Little, Brown and Company, 648 pages. $35. In a sense, it’s not fair to judge a book like this. After all, who has more resources about the history of the game and […]
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The Passover holidays have played havoc with my schedule, so there’s a lot to catch up on. First off, can you remember those Bicentennial Minutes that CBS used to broadcast in the months leading up to the big celebration? Well, Dan Epstein, author of the new Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial […]
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The top-ten baseball books as per Amazon.com. Caveat 1: Print editions only (at least for now); I’m old fashioned that way. Caveat 2: Since the rankings are updated every hour, these lists might not longer be 100 percent accurate by the time you read it. But it’ll be close enough for government work. Caveat 3: […]
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First of all, congratulations to Linda P. of Lindenhurst, IL, winner of last week’s book, Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76, by Dan Epstein. Thank you all for your comments. This week’s offering is the brand-spankin’ new Down to the Last Pitch: How the 1991 Minnesota Twins and Atlanta […]
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Feast or famine: we haven’t had a book written by a real umpire in how many years? Bruce Weber’s As They See ‘Em doesn’t count because he was an embedded journalist working on a project. This year we have two: Doug Harvey’s They Called Me God, and Al Clark’s Called Out but Safe. Clark, an […]
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The top-ten baseball books as per Amazon.com. Caveat 1: Print editions only (at least for now); I’m old fashioned that way. Caveat 2: Since the rankings are updated every hour, these lists might not longer be 100 percent accurate by the time you read it. But it’ll be close enough for government work. Caveat 3: […]
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Apropos of earlier entries about the 25th anniversary of Major League and a suggested new line of bio-pics, here’s a list from SI.com’s Extras Mustard of “11 Sports Movie Characters Who Would Suck at Their Sport in Real Life.” Two of the 11 come from baseball flics, including Henry Rowengartner in Rookie of the Year Ignoring the fact […]
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Welcome back, boys and girls. It’s time for that annual exercise in which we compare the Big Two: Sports Illustrated vs. ESPN the Magazine to see how the baseball previews compare. On the one hand, it can’t be too easy to keep coming up with new ideas for the issue. You profile the new hot […]
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First of all, congratulations to Bob W. of Chantilly, VA, winner of last week’s book, Long Shot, by Mike Piazza and Lonnie Wheeler. Thank you all for your comments. This week’s offering is the brand-spankin’ new Stars and Strikes: Baseball and American in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76 by Dan Epstein. A reminder about the […]
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Last month I received a copy of Chasing Dreams, the companion volume to the baseball exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish History. Thumbing through it, I found this portrait of Bernard Malamud, author of The Natural, one of the highest regarded baseball novels of all time. A few days afterwards, the cover story […]
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Once again, Tom Hoffarth, media columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News, is doing his 30 baseball books in 30 days feature. First up: Mover and Shaker: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers, and Baseball’s Westward Expansion by my old SABR pal, Andy McCue.
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One of the things I used to love about the Sunday before the season started was the wealth of baseball supplements in the newspapers. Sadly, that’s no longer the case, given what’s been going on in the industry over the past several years. And, as I’ve grown older and more crotchety, I find I’m not […]
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It’s that time of year when publications — both print and on-line — put out their lists of hot new baseball titles, either from a staff writer or guest contributor. One of the reasons publishers get their lists out so far in advance is that the general media (i.e., not the sports sections) “celebrates” 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
More fun opening day items
April 2, 2014
Nate Silver recently began his 538.com site under the aegis of ESPN. One would hope that he and his minions will produce a lot of smart sports (i.e., baseball) stuff. Obviously a site dedicated to projections and predictions has a lot of math to it. Ugh.But you have to take the “bad” with the good. […]
Tagged as: 538.com, baseball predictions, baseball statistics, Joe Posnanski, Jonah Keri, Kansas City Royals, Mets, Nate Silver
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