Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes (see my piece on “Why Amazon’s search engine sucks“). In addition, occasionally […]
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It was a shocker to see the breaking news on CNN on Monday that James Earl Jones had passed away. The tributes that followed seemed to highlight two roles: Darth Vader from the Star Wars universe and Terrence Mann from Field of Dreams. But Jones, who died at the age of 93, was also in […]
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I don’t have a whole lot of hobbies, so when I see a book that combines any of them on my periodic “Coming down the pike” stories, I get extra pumped. Baseball: The Movie covers two of them. Now that I no longer have Turner Classic Movies, since they went to a subscription platform, I […]
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I was flipping through the dial (as it were) yesterday — Memorial Day — and came across the final episode of Band of Brothers. In the final scene, the men of Easy Company are playing baseball. Having watched BoB dozens of times, I knew the actor playing catcher was Neal McDonough, who played Buck Compton. […]
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The things one finds wandering down the rabbit hole. I was doing some research and just happened to come across the new film, Fielding Dreams: A Celebration of Baseball Scouts. It’s a fascinating look at an under-reported part of the game. The first thing I thought of was the scene in Moneyball in which Billy […]
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♦ The Baseball Hall of Fame will hold a screening of Fielding Dreams: A Celebration of Baseball Scouts on Thursday, Jan. 18. “[T]his new documentary goes beyond moneyball [sic] and features dozens of interviews with some of the scouting legends of the game, including 5 scouts who helped build the 2023 World Series Champion Texas […]
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♦ Interesting piece on “20 facts you might not know about ‘Moneyball’” from Yardbarker.com. But, sorry, leading off with “The movie is based on a book?” Maybe I’m being overcritical, but come on, this is something you might not know? ♦ Another Yardbarker piece includes Cliff Murdoch Rookie of the Year), Teddy Cullinane (Bull Durham), […]
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My, how times have changed. When A League of Their Own came out in 1992, it did so without much reference to “coming out.” While the vastly popular film did bring much deserved yet overlooked attention to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, one of the contemporary complaints is that it did not address the […]
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♦ It’s been a very long time since I wrote about the Baseball Project, “a supergroup that includes several former members of R.E.M. and makes music exclusively about the sport,” according to this new article from The New Yorker. ♦ Hot on the heels of the new Netflx documentary The Saint of Second Chances this […]
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A League of Their Own premiered more than 30 years ago. Ahead of my Bookshelf Conversation with Erin Carlson, author of No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of A League of Their Own — Big Stars, Dugout Drama, and a Home Run for Hollywood, I found several stories about the film that takes a […]
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A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes.az (See my piece on “Why Amazon’s search engine sucks.”) In addition, occasionally […]
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A couple of movies on the horizon that until today I had not been aware of. Both are apparently based on true stories. The Saint of Second Chances is a Netflix production that goes over the career of Mike Veeck, son of Bill and a second generation “hustler.” But of course, it’s more than just […]
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From The Seattle Times — based in the city which will host the 2023 midsummer classic– this list of “Great baseball movies and books in honor of MLB All-Star Week” featuring the usual suspects, at lest when it comes to films, with the possible exception of Sugar and Damn Yankees (kids, ask your grandparents. I […]
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Those are the “traditional names” for the 20th and 35th anniversaries. As mentioned in the BBS post from Friday, we are celebrating two “milestones” in baseball pop culture. Moneyball gets china for marking the 20th since its publication. Doesn’t it seem like we’ve been hearing about that for a lot longer? Friday’s entry refers to […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
In my most recent "day job," I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted another blog. Busy, busy, busy.
I did a profile piece on the award-winning cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
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
