Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
No, the player born William Joseph Skowron was not Jewish, but there is a Jewish connection, no matter how tenuous. Skowron, a resident of Chicago, was a guest on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, the NPR news quiz show hosted by landsman Peter Sagal. Long story short, Skowron said some things that sounded so detailed […]
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Because you can keep a TV on a bookshelf: Although I actually prefer the shorter version: Love the eye-roll when the Cubs’ fan refers to the “elegantly-coiffed ex-governor.”
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Bill Miller over at The On Deck Circle blog offers “Ten Reasons Why Baseball is Better Than Football,” which gives me an excuse to bring out this again: (As a bonus, you get to brush up on a foreign language.)
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Only the die-hards keep a scorecard during spring training games. There are so many substitutions, it’s hard to keep track. And it’s not only a standard ML roster of 25. You’ve also got the minor leaguers and invitees in camp. Which is why this is so honest and entertaining: Maybe it’s time for an update […]
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Getting ready for my team’s first softball practice of the season. I’ve been dealing with what the doctors call a strained abdominal muscle since October and this will be the real first. Although I have been going to the gym three times a week for the past couple, I don’t have high hopes. If I […]
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I have a soft spot for ballplayers who remain on one team for their entire career. Especially in the post reserve clause era, when athletes often look for the biggest paycheck, if not the best fit. Loyalty is a hard thing to come by these days. How many Cardinals fans expected Albert Pujols would re-sign […]
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A little bit ago, I posted this piece from The Atlantic (along with my own morose ramblings) about a whole new kind of baseball glove. Viola, from a recent ABC News story:
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The guys on my softball team make fun of my glove. It’s old and very floppy and has resulted in a couple of errors as the ball flicked would bend back the top rather than stick in the webbing. I’ve been thinking of buying a new one but have been a bit reluctant. It’s not […]
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I find it somewhat ironic ironic that a soccer game should be the venue where so many people are singing the National Anthem. It’s not even an “American sport”; at least not on a level like baseball, basketball, and football. It used to be that this was a given that fans would sing “The Star […]
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Visited by local Barnes and Noble, hoping to pick up some more baseball annual magazines. I already have a couple, but was expecting more to have arrived since I purchased them several weeks ago. I’ve been meaning to mention this for awhile. Marketing research has shown that items displayed at eye level sell better than […]
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When you’re a young kid, you don’t have any real concept of age. One of the first things you say to a new contemporary is, “I’m seven; how old are you?” When you go to camp, you think the counselors are adults, even though they’re only a few years your senior. But now that I’m […]
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My daughter, Rachel, an intern at Clear Channel, created this gallery of, ahem, “Baseball hotties” for the Z100 website.
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Richard Johnson, curator of The Sports Museum in Boston and author, co-author, or editor of several baseball titles including: The American Game; Baseball. Ethnicity, and The American Dream, Red Sox Century, DiMaggio, An Illustrated Life, and Ted Williams, A Portrait in Words and Pictures, posted this piece on Facebook today. I have taken the liberty […]
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(Kids, ask your parents/grandparents.) Rob Neyer, baseball expert and cinemaphile, noted on SB Nation that Sunday would have been William Frawley‘s 125th birthday. Frawley, a hard-core baseball fan, is perhaps best known for his role as Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy (and later My Three Sons), but he was a veteran actor dating back […]
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But I’m getting tired of all the pundits who are saying that just because Ryan Braun’s appeal has been upheld, that doesn’t make him “innocent.” Perhaps not, but why are they so abso-freaking-lutely sure that he’s “guilty” (and how do they define that word)? Just because the panel of three arbiters cited concerns with the […]
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My commentary from the Huffington Post.
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NPR’s The Leonard Lopate Show replayed a 2008 interview with the late Hall of Famer, following the release of his book, Still a Kid at Heart: My Life in Baseball and Beyond. Jonah Keri, author of The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First and currently […]
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Where does the time go? This past Sunday, we celebrated the 500th episode of The Simpsons.(personally, I thought it was only meh). But Chris Jaffe over at Hardball Times noted that yesterday was 20 years since the softball-centric Homer at the Bat — with its own set of All-Stars — premiered. Among the athletes playing […]
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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
Let’s take a breath, people (Matt Kemp)
April 17, 2012 · 2 comments
Matt Kemp has had a wonderful start: Six home runs in the Dodgers’ first 10 games, as well as 16 RBIs, and a BA/OBP/SLG line of .487/.523/1.026. But someone has to be a bit more ambitious, or at least less lazy. ESPN projects a player’s end-of-season/162 game stats based purely on what he has […]
Tagged as: ESPN, Matt Kemp, Ryan Braun
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