Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
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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The New York Times obituary says the late actor was best known for his role as a southern sheriff in a couple of James Bond movies. Not for me. For me, Clifton was best known for his role as the penurious Charles A. Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, in Eight Men Out (which […]
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The 2013 Jackie Robinson biopic was on this morning and the more I watch it, the more problems I have with it. Please understand, I have nothing but the utmost respect for everything Robinson and the others pioneers went through (we often hear about Robinson and Larry Doby, the first African-American to play in the […]
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The 1957 film version of Jim Piersall’s Fear Strikes Out depicted the relationship between a star player, performed by Anthony Perkins — in his first starring role (according to the trailer below) and in one of the silliest examples of athletic casting since Paul Bendix tried to pull off being Babe Ruth — and his […]
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Ken Burns was on the show yesterday to discuss his upcoming documentary on Jackie Robinson, to be aired next month on PBS. If they’d just done this a few days earlier, it would have been a perfect feature for Black History Month. But I can also understand that you don’t want to publicize something […]
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There’s a link in Graham Womack’s piece on The Sporting News site that will take you to a similar ranking of “the best baseball movies of all time.” I wouldn’t have raised a peep if they substituted “favorite” for “best,” but you know how I feel about superlatives; I’m not going to let this go […]
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A while back I wrote about The Quitter (twice, in fact) which, IMHO, is one of the worst “baseball movies” ever made. I put that in quotes because, of course, it’s not really about baseball. They could have just have easily made the lead character the proprietor of a laundromat. But researching one baseball movie […]
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♦ The Minnesota Spokesman Record, an African-America newspaper, posted this review of They Played for the Love of the Game: Untold Stories of Black Baseball in Minnesota, published by Frank M. White. ♦ The Lincoln (NE) Journal Star provided this piece on Roger Angell‘s memoir, This Old Man: All in Pieces. I still maintain this […]
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Spoiler alert: This entry will discuss the end of The Quitter, which I blogged about in the previous entry. On the other hand, I consider this as saving you a few bucks and/or 90 minutes of your valuable time. You’re welcome. Against my better judgment, I watched The Quitter to its stunning conclusion. I have […]
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As I said before, I’ll watch just about any movie that has baseball as one of the key words in its description. But that doesn’t mean I’ll watch it ’til the end. Life’s too short. I came across The Quitter by accident when I checked what my local public TV station was airing for the […]
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It’s widely agreed that baseball movies as a rule don’t do well either at the box office or with critics. Sure there are exceptions — Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, and the original Bad News Bears immediately come to mind. But by and large, meh. Case in point: I recently watched a MLB Network presentation […]
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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
