Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Thanks to a comment by Robert Loy, I had a “Homer Simpson” moment for totally forgetting about a crucial Salinger/baseball connection. Loy wrote, “What I want to know is why the ever-litigious Salinger didn’t sue Bill Kinsella over being included in ‘Shoeless Joe.’ And if he was okay with it why did they change it […]
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The MLB Network will present Holy Land Hardball, the documentary about the lone season of the Israel Baseball League, on Sunday, Jan. 10 at 10 p.m.
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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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This is the time of year when we get the lists of the best and worst movies, books, etc. of the year. And because this is 2009, we get the bonus best/worst of the decade. Larry Tye’s Satchel was selected by The New York Times as one of the 100 notable books of the year, […]
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See how well you can do on this Mental Floss quiz about the 1988 film version of Eliot Asinof’s classic about the 1919 Black Sox. I had a perfect score; I’m just sayin’.
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This week in baseball books, featuring the best-sellers according to Amazon.com on Friday, December 4. Title Rank General Baseball Americana: Treasures from the Library of Congress (565) 1 The Yankee Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci (731) 2 The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of […]
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For all the best intentions, hopes, and excitement, the Israel Baseball League lasted just one season. Tepid responses by the media and native-born population, poor playing conditions, and questionable business practices all led to the league’s downfall after its 2007 debut. Little of that gloom, however, is evidenced in Holy Land Hardball, a documentary about […]
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The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will recognize the twin traditions of baseball and film when, for the fourth consecutive year, it hosts the Baseball Film Festival in Cooperstown, Oct. 2-4. Thirteen films, with themes ranging from women in baseball to a baseball league in Israel, will be screened as filmmakers compete for […]
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As per this piece from The Playlist blog. These questions were aimed at Pitt on a red carpet stop (a horrible, soulless place to conduct a mini, 30-second interview) so don’t expect anything too earth shattering. But he was asked if he thinks the “Moneyball project can be salvaged and go into extra innings. “My […]
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Channel surfing over the weekend. Found a few baseball flicks of varying quality. Don’t Look Back: The Story of Leroy “Satchel” Paige, a 1981 biopic starring Lou Gossett, Jr. as Paige, Cleavon Little as some annoying sidekick named “Rabbit,” and Clifton Davis as Cool Papa Bell. Came in on a scene where Paige is auditioning […]
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From the famous Monty Python “Parrot Sketch.” Why do I bring this up? because Moneyball, the movie, may not be dead after all. Sony Pictures Entertainment has quietly moved to salvage its troubled movie project “Moneyball” by hiring the prominent screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for a quick rewrite, while looking to add Scott Rudin, known for […]
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I no longer subscribe to the print version of SI, but I do pick up the occasional copy (which is kind of silly since the cost of four or five newsstand editions is roughly equivalent to a deep-discount subscription). The annual “Where Are They Now” is one of them. The editors usually do a good […]
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Given the draft of the script. I’ll watch anything about baseball. Cartoons, documentaries, lousy films (Jackie Robinson was a great ballplayer, but a poor actor). But this draft of the aborted Brad Pitt vehicle would sorely try my patience (Groucho Marx: “Don’t mind if I do. You must try mine sometime.”). Moneyball, the non-fiction neo-classic […]
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I must admit, I agree with the SF Chronicle’s Gwen Knapp in her column where she avers that the book was not meant to be a feature film. In fact, the fate of the movie might have been more dramatic than any material “Moneyball” could have provided. What would have constituted the big moments in […]
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We so much for that. It seems that the screen version of Moneyball, which was all set to begin filming, has been canned, according to this story in Variety. The move came after Pascal read a rewrite that [Steven] Soderbergh did to Steven Zaillian’s script and found it very different from the earlier scripts she […]
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A new documentary about the late Tigers pitcher is set to make its debut, appropriately enough, in Detroit. More on the project.
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Because you can frame the ticket stubs and put them on the bookshelf…Or simply the book, The Year the Yankees Lost First The Pennant, by Douglas Wallop, on which the musical was based. So, a remake of Damn Yankees, starring Jim Carrey as the Devil and Jake Gyllenhaal as “Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo?” Seems […]
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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
