Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Yesterday, actually (close enough for jazz), that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho changed how the movie industry dealt with sex and violence, for better or worse. There are several interesting analyses, including David Thomson’s The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, which I’m reading at the moment, as well as this from […]
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Baseball Stuff You Never Needed to Know and Can Certainly Live Without, by Robert Schnakenberg. Triumph, 2010. Schnakenberg takes his love for pop culture (anti-culture?) and puts a national pastime spin on it in this little faux-reference volume. The connection between PC and baseball has been handled in more serious veins by Jonathan Fraser Light […]
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How often was his seminal novel of youth struggling for identity and acceptance mistaken for a baseball story? Maybe that’s because of former major league catcher — and later TV personality and broadcaster — Bob Uecker’s homonymic book. (Quick aside: In the mid-90s, I worked part time for one of those statistical companies that track […]
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Bruce Markusen, author of such books as A Baseball Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s, The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, Tales From The Mets Dugout, and The Orlando Cepeda Story, provided this list of Nickname “All-Stars” for The Hardball Times
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Our favorite game show host, Peter Sagal, included the recent shocking news about Mark McGwire on the latest episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. In the “Who’s Carl This Time” feature, sidekick Carl Kassel offered the quote: “I used very very low dosages. There was no way I wanted to look like Lou Ferrigno […]
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Sorry, almost done with this catching up business, so bear with me. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s my take on the November session of Yankees Fantasy Camp in the Dec, 17 issue of the New Jersey Jewish News. In addition, My teammate Ira Jaskoll wrote this piece for the Jewish Magazine […]
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Because you can keep the confection on a bookshelf (unopened) and certainly the prizes, have gander at this NY Times piece on the current fate and questionable future of Cracker Jack (singular)..
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Abrams publishers has come out with some very neat books over the last couple of years. The house, which specializes in art and photography books recently began a line of perpetual calendars on themes.The main problem reminds me of an episode from my childhood. When I was about 10, we had dinner at a local […]
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With the Mets season just about over, I needed to find new ways to amuse myself. When I was a kid at day camp, we used to play this game, “initials.” One player would think of the name of some baseball player, the other would try to guess. You got a home run if you […]
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From the eclectic PitchersndPoets site comes the “Rogue’s Baseball Index,” a sort of urban dictionary about the national pastime. RBI is divided into several categories, including entries about players, fans, management, media, et al. A random entry: The George Will is a hyper-intellectualized fan who gets so caught up in the history and legend and […]
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Unless, of course, your toddler tosses it back. From Big League Stew, a Yahoo sports blog: Since being featured on the front page of Yahoo! on Wednesday afternoon, the Big League Stew post containing the highlight has been one of the most clicked in this blog’s history and I don’t think it’s hard to figure […]
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Baseball, books on language, and Roy Blount, Jr. So how cool is it to combine all three? The sportswriter and frequent panelist on one of my favorite NPR programs, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me (so make that four things, by extension), recently published Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof: […]
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This week’s episode of my favorite NPR program featuerd Jimmy Fallon on the “Not my job” segment. Since we just celebrated the 30th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night, the topic was bad baseball promotions. Fallon should be an expert since he made a bad baseball movie (Fever Pitch).
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by Brent Mayne. I put the question mark in there because I’m not sure what to make of this irreverent piece by the colorful Jimmy Scott who reminds me more and more of a Martin Short character. What separates The Art of Catching from any other book, like A Tale of Two Cities or The […]
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Today’s strip from “Girls & Sports,” by Justin Borus & Andrew Feinstein
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From our friend Greg Spira comes this link to LibraryJournal.com’s annual baseball feature. Among the usual share of biographies and memoirs, histories, and social commentaries are such themes as: Yet another biography about Yogi Berra, this one by homonymic author Allen Barra, and one on Walter O’Malley by Michael D’Antonio Ira Berkow’s bio of Lou […]
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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
Bits and pieces
May 22, 2010
SFReeper critiques Emma Span’s look at the game from the distaff side and Jason Turbow’s do’s and dont’s. If the British read Moneyball, do they have to convert it into pounds or euros? The AV Club conducted this Q&A with Dan Epstein, author of Big Hair & Plastic Grass. You gotta wonder if he grew […]
Tagged as: baseball books
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