Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Kudos to Mr. Fox. The artist received the assignment of a lifetime. His work has been selected by Topps as a special insert into their 2009 set. But not as a mere insert. Distributed among the thousands of packs are “redemption cards” which can be exchanged for one of 50 individually drawn card-size sketches. So […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The Bookshelf is interested in all aspects of the field: writers, publishers, and those who are the last stop on the way to getting those materials into our hands. Not all of it comes from large retails outlets. In fact, some of the more interesting outlets are small merchants with a love for their product. […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Joe Orlando, author of Collecting Sports Legends: The Ultimate Hobby Guide (Zyrus Publishing) spent a few minutes with the Bookshelf discussing the state of the memorabilia industry (surprisingly healthy at the high end) and the difficulty in choosing what to focus on as a collector.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I’m a big fan of audiobooks. It fills in the empty spaces during the commute and increases the number of books I can get to. The narrator of the individual pieces can make or break the experience. Some are lyrical and others sound almost computer-generated. You can almost hear when they know their subject, that […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Baseball GB posted this review of Roger Angell’s 2004 collection. An amazing amount of the book can be read here, thanks to Google Books. Like any master storyteller, Angell’s work translates well to audio. This sample from audio.com comes from The Summer Game, another collection of his essays that appear mostly in The New Yorker […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
How did the Brooklyn Dodgers get their name? According to a recent edition of NPR’s Studio 360, you can thank Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, who were battling it out to see whose system of electricity would prevail. Mike Daisey narrated a segment on “Tesla vs. Edison”: There was a trolley running in Brooklyn on […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Where were lectures like this when I was in college? Prof. Timothy B. Shutt from Kenyon College offers this eight-plus-hour rendering of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game: The History of Baseball in America.” Here’s the Course Overview from rbflim.com: “Baseball has been celebrated as “America’s National Pastime” for more than one hundred and […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The New York Times ran these audios from various celebrities regarding their thoughts on Yankee Stadium, including Penny Marshall (A League of Their Own) Robert Creamer (Babe: The Legend Comes to Life) Author Jane Heller Ari Fleischer, former White House Press secretary
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Mel Foster narrates this unabridged version of Feinstein’s latest baseball title. That’s almost 19 hours of listening to what sounds very much like a computer-generated voice. Which is a shame, because the book — which considers the approach to the game by two veteran pitchers (Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina) — albeit long and with […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Ossie Davis narrated Jackie Robinson’s autobiography, which was released as an audiobook earlier this year. Davis, who died in 2005, was born in 1917, two years before Robinson, so it seems quite appropriate that he would lend his “old man’s voice” to the project, making it seem like the great player himself was doing the […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
On the June 21 edition of Only a Game, Bill Littlefield offered this interview with John Feinstein, author of Living on the Black. (Sorry, but you have to listen to the preceding stories before you get to the Feinstein segment.) Read an excerpt from Living on the Black. The Leonard Lopate Show of June 24 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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
