Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
The Pandemic Baseball Book Club has just announced a giveaway contest with il premio di tutti i premi. (That’s “the prize of all prizes” for you non-Italian speakers out there. Yes, I’m pretentious.) Just posted on Facebook today so I thought I would share it. The lucky winner of “The Pandemic Baseball Book Club Grand […]
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Still unsure of what lies ahead for the 2020 season. All it takes is for one team to explode with cases of Covid-19. God forbid it ever comes to this. So on that happy note, humbly submitted for your amusement.
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Saturday mornings usually meant sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal. Yada, yada, yada. Very sweet, very nostalgic. Well, it’s Saturday morning and I thought I’d use the occasion to offer a few items about our favorite sport. The first one, “Abner, the Baseball,” is at once charming, creepy, and ahead […]
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Going down the rabbit hole while researching the previous entry on M*A*S*H, I came across a few more interesting items about baseball and episodic television from ME-TV. Submitted for your amusement: 6 forgotten TV shows about baseball that all struck out Can you name the TV show by its baseball episode? Star Trek in baseball, […]
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A photo from 1918, during the Spanish Flu pandemic. More on baseball and the corona virus: Baseball has survived pandemics before, and for desperate fans, that counts (Washington Post) How Babe Ruth and baseball confronted another major pandemic (Pinstripe Alley) Required reading: September 1918: War, Plague, and the World Series, by Skip Desjardin
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why can’t Amazon searches be more specific? Every few months, I look for new titles that are coming out in the near future. For the life of me, I don’t understand why I can’t tailor my search to exclude topics I don’t want, specifically kids’ lit and “romance” novels that somehow feature baseball in their […]
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If you follow me on Facebook, you know where I stand on the current political situation: I hate it. It’s turned a lot of Americans into an “us-versus-them” with no compunction towards kindness and tolerance. But I have tried to keep this blog politics-free. Or at least it was until CNN posted this piece explaining […]
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There’s been some chatter lately about changing the MLB postseason structure. Here’s the synposis: MLB is considering a move in which each league would have three division winners and four wild-card teams making the postseason starting in 2022, sources said. The best team in the league would receive a bye into the division series. The […]
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Well, the good thing about late December and the beginning of winter is that by the time next week’s list rolls around, the days will be getting longer. Wouldn’t it make sense to have the shortest day in the middle of the season, and the longest somewhere in August? But I digress… Note: The Amazon […]
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Because you can keep a donut on your bookshelf (but not for too long). Since I mentioned my work at Trader Joe’s in the previous post and I am working on a piece from Sunday’s New York Times in their special section “How the ‘Babe Ruth of Cookies’ Brought Us a Dozen Dazzling Holiday Recipes,” I […]
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Take a look at the video in the sidebar of my trip to Yankees Fantasy Camp. Hard to believe it was 10 years ago. I was down there to cover the brand-new “kosher camper component” for the New Jersey Jewish News (an extended version appeared in Yankees 2010 Annual, a publication of Maple Street Press). […]
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Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one […]
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… but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” My wife an I recently attended several movies at our local film festival, once of which was Late Night, the new Mindy Kaling/Emma Thomson comedy, which has received glowing reviews from some major sources. Long story short, I hated it. I found […]
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“Die Hard” Phillies fan? He wasn’t much better at BP, either.
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Every year, I buy a pack or two of Topps baseball cards, just to see what they’re up to. At the risk of sounding like a GOML (“Get off my lawn”) grump, I firmly believe the cards were “better” when I was a kid. Sure, the photography and production methods have improved, the colors are […]
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A zissen Pesach to all my landsmen baseball friends out there. From the site Make your model or family seders a home run with The Baseball Haggadah, connecting two rites of spring, baseball and the story of Passover. By holding up the Exodus story next to the concept of a beloved national pastime, Rabbi Forman casts […]
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Just finished Ron Darling’s new book, 108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game (with Daniel Paisner, who also worked on Darling’s 2016 book, Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life). It’s fairly standard fare. Darling relates stories about memorable players, […]
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I am not prone to using profanity on any of my blogs but when I picked up my MLB Preview, what did I see? A photo of Le’veon Bell, the NY Jets big deal. Now, I know that the baseball annuals tailor their covers according to region, but this? Inexcusable. There shouldn’t be anything other […]
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A semi-regular (I guess that sounds better than “irregular”) attempt to catch up on the baseball book and other news wince my last similar posting. * NY Daily News sportswriter/author Bill Madden contributed this list of the best baseball books of all time. All are worthy of the accolades (A Day in the Bleachers, The […]
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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
Such stuff as dreams are made on
July 14, 2020
With apologies to Shakespeare. I received this link from a high school classmate today about a treasure trove of baseball cards found in the attic of a recently deceased 97-year-old. (Thanks, Terry!) I have fantasies about some friend or colleague telling me a loved one wants to just get rid of a bunch of old […]
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