Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Since you could technically watch a video if you have a TV or device on your bookshelf… Lewis Black is one of my favorite comedians. Smart, politically savvy, cranky, and old like me. And profane, so EXTREMELY FOUL LANGUAGE HERE!!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED HT to Shawn R., himself a staunch Orioles fan, for the link.
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Too bad I didn’t know about this before. Could have started a GoFundMe campaign. Beverly Hills home of Detroit Tigers great Hank Greenberg pulls in $7.75 million
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Previous entries to the Bookshelf on Dr. King include this piece on his baseball connections. And another here. And this one, titled “Baseball and Dr. King.” Two books published in 2017 — The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age and One Nation Under Baseball: How the […]
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Skip to the relevant part at about 50 seconds…
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(Posted early Saturday, but the time references refer to Friday.) The second full day began with “A Celebration of 70 Years: Jackie Robinson’s Journey,” with panelists Lee Lowenfish, author of Branch Rickey: The Ferocious Gentleman among other baseball titles; author and former NY Times columnist William C. Rhoden; and Della Britton Baeza, CEO of the […]
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I know, I know. “Hey, Ron,” you say, “What’s going on? You don’t call, you don’t write…” Things have been a bit hectic since I lost my job as sports and features editor of the NJ Jewish News last September due to a corporate takeover. Although I was able to distract myself for a month […]
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I had to go to my local library site to renew some stuff and saw this: Also someone stopped by the house to have me sign a copy of 501 Baseball Books. That hasn’t happened for awhile. Sweet.
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If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you know I have an aversion to hyperbole. Words like “greatest” or “best” or “ever” or “forever” have always raised a red flag for me because the majority of the time, they’re not. It may be unfair because I haven’t read this one save […]
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From time to time, I’ve written about trying to “cull the herd,” i.e., getting rid of some of the hundreds and hundreds of books I’ve accumulated over the years. Despite the collection, I do not consider myself a “collector.” I know I’m never going to acquire every baseball book ever published. Not even every book […]
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Last week’s New York Times book review featured the top titles in several categories, including sports. You’d think there might be one baseball book in the mix. But you’d be wrong. Marc Tracy, who writes about college sports for the the Times, handled the assignment. His essay includes two books on high school and college […]
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With apologies to George and Ira Gershwin… They’re writing books on stats but not for me New ways to look at stats but not for me… In this week’s look at the top 10 baseball titles on Amazon, we have Incredible Baseball Stats by Kevin Reavy and Ryan Spaeder. To be honest, I received an […]
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(Note: I published this piece on one of my other blogs, The Worried Journalist. Just call me Double-Duty Kaplan.) When I was a kid I once got in in trouble for spending twice my allowance because I bought the latest issues of Baseball Digest and The Sporting News on the way back from running errands. […]
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As you may know, I recently became a victim of the downturn in print publishing. My weekly newspaper was bought out by another publication and while it will continue as an independent entity, the majority of staff were let go because of redundant positions. It’s a vicious cycle: the paper fires the staff and the […]
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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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Friend of the Bookshelf James M. wrote to tell me a way to get around some of those pesky Amazon search annoyances. Thank you, sir. I tried your Amazon search for recently published “baseball” books and replicated your results with too many children’s and romance titles. I could not find a negative filter on Amazon […]
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I am preparing one of those “coming down the pike” entries to let you faithful friends know what new and exciting baseball titles await you in the year ahead. Amazon is my on-line book merchant of choice because, big. But I have a couple of complaints: I think I’m pretty savvy when it comes to […]
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As a “reward” for having my submission on an episode of Deadwood accepted into the Extra Hot Great canon (you can go ahead and skip to about the 37-minute mark), I got to choose a topic for an “EHG mini.” Shouldn’t surprise anyone that I found a way to combine my two favorite pastimes — sports […]
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As you might have noticed from my weekly posting about baseball best-sellers, I’m not overly happy that Lenny Dykstra’s new memoir, House of Nails, is doing well. It came in at No. 11 on the most recent New York Times best-seller list for non-fiction. This isn’t a case of schadenfreude. It’s that people are more […]
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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
The first harbingers of spring — UPDATE
January 27, 2018
If you’ve been following the blog for at least a couple of years, you know I take great pleasure around this time because this is when the baseball magazines hit the stores. But like any person my age, I think things were better “back in the day.” Thanks to 24/7 spots media, the idea of […]
Tagged as: Baseball magazines
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