Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Or in this case The Baseball Uncyclopedia: A Highly Opinionated, Myth-Busting Guide to the Great American Game — one of my favorite irreverent books about the game — gets a mini-review from Mark’s Epehemera, a card collecting blog.
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The current issue of ESPN the Magazine includes a cute feature titled “Over the Top,” by Amanda Angel. The Greatest Story Ever Told is about Jesus himself, but these days you’d half-expect to find that title on a bookseller’s spoets shelves. A quick glance at the genre shows many true, real and seemingly impossible epic […]
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Words, actually. And days. In recognition of the post-season, the Brian Lehrer Show on NPR had two days of baseball terms, courtesy of Erin McKean of wordnik.com. The program was so nice, they ran it twice, first on Oct. 20and an “extra innings” segment the following day. McKean, who publishes Verbatim Magaizne (to which I […]
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Because you can keep the confection on a bookshelf (unopened) and certainly the prizes, have gander at this NY Times piece on the current fate and questionable future of Cracker Jack (singular)..
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With the Mets season just about over, I needed to find new ways to amuse myself. When I was a kid at day camp, we used to play this game, “initials.” One player would think of the name of some baseball player, the other would try to guess. You got a home run if you […]
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From the eclectic PitchersndPoets site comes the “Rogue’s Baseball Index,” a sort of urban dictionary about the national pastime. RBI is divided into several categories, including entries about players, fans, management, media, et al. A random entry: The George Will is a hyper-intellectualized fan who gets so caught up in the history and legend and […]
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With apologies to George Harrison. Apropos to this item regarding an article in The Wall Street Journal, Bob Wechsler of the Lehigh Valley News extrapolated on the correlation between players’ initials and statistics.
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and I’ll be grateful for about 2 1/2 extra years, according to this piece from The Wall Street Journal. … researchers at Wayne State University, major-league players who have nicknames live 2½ years longer, on average, than those without them. On the other hand, I can absolutely refute further findings that “players whose first or […]
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A.K.A. Steve Lyons. The nine-year veteran has done well for himself in retirement, currently working in the broadcast booth for the Dodgers. He’s the coauthor of The Psycho 100, an entertaining — if somewhat uneven — collection of outrageous moments in the game, which I will review at a later date. Lyons turns 49 today.
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The May/June issue of ForeWord Magazine, a publication that specializes in small and university presses, carries my feature on nine 2009 baseball titles, including: Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training High-Flying Birds: The 1942 St. Louis Cardinal Babe Ruth: Remembering the Bambino in Stories, Photos & Memorabilia Yankee Colors: The Glory Years […]
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I wish George F. Will would publish another baseball book. In the meantime, here’s his quiz from the current issue of Newsweek. Read an excerpt from Bunts. Read an excerpt from Men at Work.
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From our friend Greg Spira comes this link to LibraryJournal.com’s annual baseball feature. Among the usual share of biographies and memoirs, histories, and social commentaries are such themes as: Yet another biography about Yogi Berra, this one by homonymic author Allen Barra, and one on Walter O’Malley by Michael D’Antonio Ira Berkow’s bio of Lou […]
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Perhaps the most synonymous name with sports equipment and the national pastime is Louisville Slugger. It’s come to be used like Kleenex, Jello, or Xerox — technically incorrect, but representative of the industry. Hard to believe but Hillerich & Bradsby, the company that produces this piece of Americana, is in its fifth generation and 125 […]
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This is the time of year when home gardeners (of which I am one) look forward to receiving their seed catalogs. I also enjoy getting the latest from the publishing world. Today I received the Ivan R. Dee catalog, which includes the following baseball titles: Catcher, by Peter Morris — The author of such neo-classics […]
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This was today’s entry on my Mensa Puzzle Calendar: “Add one letter to the four letters at each base to form the word for a player on a Major League baseball team. Then take those added letters and add one more to form yet another team player.” It looks better in the original, and may […]
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The Baseball Timeline, by Burt Solomon (Dorling Kindersley Publishing). The Chronicle of Baseball: A Century of Major League Action, by John Mehno (Carlton Books). A Stitch in Time: A Baseball Chronology, 1845-2000. by Gene Elston (Halcyon Press). Day-by-Day in Baseball History, by Carl R. Moesche (McFarland). Baseball Extra: A Newspaper History of the Glorious Game […]
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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
* But seriously, folks…
August 4, 2009 · 4 comments
Had a good time at the SABR convention in DC. It was nice too meet so many folks who are just as nuts (if not more so) than me. Being the bookworm that I am, it was especially nice hanging out with the writers, many of whom were peddling their products in the vendors’ room. […]
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