Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
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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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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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
