Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
This is a response that any interviewer loves to hear. It indicates the interviewee finds the query interesting and/or hasn’t heard it before (or is just buttering up the interviewer). So here’s a good one posed by TB Sports blog: “How many baseball books do you read each year?“
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About 20 years ago, I happened upon a used book store in Toronto that had an amazing selection of baseball titles. A) Does anyone know the name of the store, and B) is it still around these days? Merci.
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George Edward Taylor played two seasons in the Majors — seven years apart — in the late 1800s.
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Came across an item about a book club created by a Tampa Bay Rays blogging outfit. The concept At the beginning of each month, we will pick a book. If you would like to participate, you go out and get a copy of the book and read it during the month. At the end of […]
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Finally got a round to update my sidebar links. Some of the items marked as “new” weren’t, and some new one deserving of notice needed to be added. All new site entries will be preceded by an asterisk and followed by “(NEW)”, just to make it easy for you. Eephus League: A neat site, virtually […]
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Congrats to Max Weder, winner of the December Bookshelf prize, Fifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had, by Edward Achorn. By the way, Weder ‘s wife, Jennifer Ettinger, does some lovely baseball art. Visit the Flickr page here and her website here.
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Onion SportsDome Although I still miss Pilot episode, Part one Pilot episode, Part two Pilot episode, Part three
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One of the minor characters in the Black Sox Scandal was a former ballplayer named Billy Graham, who had sought to disguise his identity by changing his name to Maharg. Brilliant disguise. So in that spirit, Happy Birthday to Loyd Christopher, a close proximity-reversal of the name Christopher Lloyd, who played Sleepy Bill Burns, Maharg’s […]
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No literary birthdays today, but did you know that before he was a famous humanitarian Albert Schweitzer played for the St. Louis Browns? “Cheese,” as he was called by his friends, was born this date in 1882. I’ll go you one better: Many people complain that Gary Cooper was a lousy athlete and a poor […]
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Harvey Araton published this sweet tribute to these veteran sportswriters who passed away over the last few months. While I didn’t know Mr. Ziegel, I did have the pleasure of making Maury‘s acquaintance and though I didn’t have the same relationship with him as Araton, I did find him very open and charitable when it […]
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Don’t look for it on you calendar, but today is Baseball Blogger Alliance Day. BBA is a group of bloggers — some 230 or so — who banded together, as it were, in 2009. There’s at least one blogger per Major league team except, inexplicably, the Atlanta Braves (although that might have changed by the […]
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(Sorry, no nickname. This is becoming more and more of a problem as the players get younger.) Robert James Monday (how do you get Rick from that? You get Rick from Richard; you get Bob from Robert) turns 65 today. A solid outfielder for the Athletics (he was the number one overall pick in the […]
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My daughter was playing in her school’s band at last night’s Texas-Illinois game at MSG, the night-cap of the Coaches Against Cancer tournament. While I was waiting for her to come home (the game went into overtime and the kids didn’t return until about 1:30 a.m.), I was flipping through the dial and found this […]
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So much for beach reading. Adult Hardcover Sales Decreased 40% in September Duh! No, really. What are people reading these days? Are we turning into Eloi (and if you don’t know what that is, you’ve perhaps proved my point)?
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Jerry Remy, the Red Sox’ popular second baseman from the late ’70s to mid ’80s, turns 58 today. A local product who made good in Red Sox Nation, Remy became a broadcaster following his active career and wrote a couple of primers on the game: Jerry Remy’s Red Sox Heroes: The RemDawg’s All-Time Favorite Red […]
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A couple of book-related birthdays today: Jim “Kitty” Kaat, turns 72 today. This is one of those “longevity” cases for Hall of Fame consideration. Kaat won 283 games, but he did it in 25 seasons. He published his memoirs, Still Pitching: Musings from the Mound and the Microphone in 2003, looking back on his playing […]
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You won’t find this particular Dick Williams on Baseball-Reference.com or in The Baseball Encyclopedia. This Dick Williams was a member of the Bombers, my team at Yankees Fantasy Camp just about a year ago. Yesterday I received the sad news that he had died at the age of 76 from a massive heart attack. Williams […]
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but I don’t go making a video about it.
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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
What we do: James Bailey’s comment
January 28, 2011
I wanted to give James Bailey’s well-stated comment on my post about reviewing “up front” treatment: Ron, Just to clarify, I do think we have a greater responsibility to the reader. A reviewer’s responsibility to an author is to be fair, not to be positive. The books I’ve passed on reviewing were typically bad books […]
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