Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Meant to post this a while back. The actor famed for, among other roles, his rendition of Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams died last week at the age of 67. There have been complaints about the casting of and portrayal by Liotta as the shamed Black Sox outfielder. For one thing, there was […]
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Continuing on the cinematic theme… The next sub-genre is “best baseball movies based on a true story.” And the entries are A League of Their Own (1992) 42 (2013) The Rookie (2002) Eight Men Out (1988) Note that in general, you won’t find anything older than the 1970s, so in this instance there’s no The […]
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Getting closer (hopefully) to pitchers and catchers reporting but there’s still time to catch a good baseball movie. Or a bad one, depending on your point of view. The folks at MLB’s website are offering their choices on various themes. In this entry, they seek to answer the question, “Which baseball film has the best […]
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when articles like appear: Which baseball movie has the greatest Hollywood ending? Where to begin? How about the choice of three films for this panel discussion between Ian Browne, Anthony Castrovince, Alyson Footer (who served as the piece’s writer and moderator), Adam McCalvy, and Manny Randhawa. In what appears to be a series of such […]
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The character actor who played Chick Gandil in the classic baseball flick Field of Dreams died Nov. 17 at the age of 78 after a long battle with Parkinson’s. Gandil — a notorious member of the Black Sox — was not the only baseball figure LaFleur portrayed: he also appeared as Babe Ruth in The Sandlot. […]
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I was looking for a baseball movie to watch the other day and came across It Happened in Flatbush, (1942) which I confused with one of my favorites, It Happens Every Spring (1947). Amazingly, I had never seen Flatbush before so I gave it a shot, especially since it featured Lloyd Nolan, one of my […]
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Don’t bother looking for him on Baseball-Reference; instead, check him out on IMDB. David Lander was probably — unfortunately — best know as part of the moronic duo of Lenny and Squiggy (his character) on the inexplicably popular I Love Lucy knockoff, Laverne and Shirley (all due respect, of course). But his baseball connection was his […]
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Once in a while at work, we have some fun by going around with our favorite fill-in-the-blank at the end of our pre-opening meeting. Last Friday — Aug. 28 — we were asked to name our favorite childhood and current movies. I couldn’t recall a flick from my youth at the time (The Wizard of […]
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Would have posted this sooner if not for power outages caused by the latest storm. While neither of these latest casualties were professional ballplayers, they both had a cultural impact on the game. Wilford Brimley, who passed away August 1 at the age of 85, appeared as Pop Fisher, manager of the woebegotten New York […]
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I’m am the poster child when it comes to falling down the rabbit hole. Whenever a book by a writer I especially respect refers to additional material, I will seek it out more often than not. While going through The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, Keith […]
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After the previous post, I decided to do a “baseball movie” search on Netflix to see what I could stream on my computer. Here are the results in the order they appear in the results, with some comments where warranted. Note that this was the exact search phrase used for these results. There are other […]
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Sometimes I get grief when I complain about the quality of baseball films. My friends say I’m being too hard because I know and expect too much. In the words of that great philosopher, Steve Martin But I came across this on Youtube and thought it was pretty cool: Joc Pederson, Justin Turner, and Ferris, […]
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I was at work the other day when a thought came to me as I was looking at codes for various articles of produce. Some background: Trader Joe’s has a wonderful policy of donating food that might not be up to “selective customers’ standards” (my term, not the store’s). Hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars […]
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After all, there have been recent revivals for musicals like West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and Oklahoma… That’s the first thing I thought of when I came across this interesting piece by Thomas Boswell in yesterday’s Washington Post. After all, there has to bee some explanation as to how the Nationals came back […]
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Don’t know what I was thinking when I left The Stratton Story out of my entry on movie trailers. One of the better bio-pics. Plus it has one of my favorite actors, Jimmy Stewart, in the lead. Several items of note: The Stratton Story was directed by Sam Wood, the same man who gave us […]
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Was tooling around the dial the other day (well, I guess TVs don’t actually have dials anymore) and came across one of my favorite “poppy seed” movies, A League of Their Own. (Amazingly, I can’t find the definition of a PSM online, but to my mind, it’s one of those films that you’ll watch whenever […]
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I didn’t want to post these yesterday, given that Memorial Day should have a lock on “lest we forget,” at least on May 31st. I was saddened by the news that Rob Edelman, 70, passed away last week. He combined two of my favorite things — the national pastime and cinema — in one of […]
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The legendary actor/singer passed away yesterday at the age of 97. Baseball connections? She played Aimee Alexander, wife to the Hall of Fame pitcher, Grover Cleveland (played by Ronald Reagan), in the 1951 biopic, The Winning Team. Then there was this classic scene in the 1962 classic, That Touch of Mink… Here’s a behind-the-scenes clip […]
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Because you can keep a viewing device on your bookshelf. In the most recent episode, “The Fresh Princ-ipal,” the “B” story involves the eponymous hero, suddenly being unable to flip hamburgers in his shop after his friend and frequent customer, Teddy, asks about his technique. Bob’s wife, Linda, asks “What’s going on? Bob, what did […]
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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
