Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
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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I will watch any movie or TV program that has baseball as a main component of the story. So I was quite disappointed when I didn’t get to see The Catcher Was a Spy, based on Nicholas Dawidoff’s wonderful 1994 bio of Moe Berg, at the theaters. Should have realized by how quickly it moved […]
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Hi. Remember me? It’s been awhile. Couldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Long story short, I spent the last month after my regular job working with a gentleman on his memoirs. Nobody you know, so don’t bother trying to figure out who. Nothing baseball, or even sports, oriented. It was truly an educational experience, since […]
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Tab who? Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, MO. Hunter, a heartthrob in the 1950s and 60s, played the character of Joe Hardy in Damn Yankees, one of the great musicals of all time. Of course, Hunter, who died on Sunday at the age of 86, played in many other movies, but for the purposes of this […]
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That’s the story from the Hollywood Reporter which reports that Amazon is working on the project. The retail giant/streaming service is developing a TV series based on Penny Marshall’s Tom Hanks and Geena Davis feature, A League of Their Own. Mozart in the Jungle‘s Will Graham and Broad City‘s Abbi Jacobson will co-write and executive produce […]
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To celebrate opening day, here’s the lineup on TCM tomorrow (March 29) starting at 815 am: 815 — The Big Leaguer 930 — Too Many Women 1000 — The Winning Team 1145 — Home Run on the Keys Noon — The Babe Ruth Story 2 pm — Diamond Demon 215 — The Great American Pastime […]
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I looked at a lot of video clips when writing about the recent passing of John Mahoney, the actor who played Kid Gleason, manager of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, in the film version of Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out. I was specifically looking for the courtroom scene but couldn’t find it. I did find […]
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Hardly a comparison, but there’s word that a new biopic on the life of Roberto Clemente is in the works, having found a director. The rights to film, purchased by Legendary — which has released such hits as Interstellar, Kong: Skull Island, and Unbroken, as well as the forthcoming Skyscraper and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom […]
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I was at work the other day and the conversation turned to movies. I talked about a recent bio-pic and one of my younger colleagues did not know what that was. I was kind of surprised but then realized, a) not everyone is a movie buff; b) a movie buff might not like bio-pics; c) […]
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These are my favorite posts, taking a look at what new baseball books are on the horizon. A few notes: Traditional print rules the land here here. There may be a Kindle edition involved, but no Kindle-only titles are included herein. Second, Amazon does not want top make my life easier. I practically never include […]
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Haven’t done one of these in awhile, but here we go… This whole unpleasant business with Charlottesville has opened a can of worms when it comes to deciding which people who had previously been recognized by way of statues, parks, and roadways should have those honors stripped. Case in point: Tom Yawkey, former owner of the Boston […]
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Two of my favorite pastimes are baseball and movies. So when a book comes along about a baseball movie, you know I’m all over that. So there was with great joy when I learned awhile back that Richard Sandomir, the former sports media columnist for The New York Times (now on the “dead beat” for […]
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As you may have notice, these entries have been falling off in the last several weeks. My apologies. A new full-time job — very different from what I had been doing as the sports and features editor of a weekly community newspaper in suburban New jersey — has put new and strange demands on my […]
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The author of the inspirational memoir Fear Strikes Out — which openly chronicled Piersall’s battle with mental illness — died Saturday at the age of 87. The book was much better than the movie. According to the excellent obituary by Richard Goldstein in The New York Times, “I hated the movie,” Piersall wrote in his […]
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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 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
