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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From the category archives:
Because I can…
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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Yesterday on Jeopardy: Then I sat down to do the Times‘ crossword: Crazy, man. One of my Facebook friends suggested there should be a version of Jeopardy devoted solely to the national pastime. Baseball in Jeopardy? You’re welcome.
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I am a Jeopardy nut. I try to never miss an episode, much to the occasional annoyance of my family. Naturally, I’m always stoked when there’s a baseball question. At the risk of sounding judgmental, I rarely expect the brainy contestants to have sports trivia as part of their knowledge base. And when there’s an […]
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There’s a scene in the excellent baseball film Bull Durham in which Nuke LaLoosh, the prodigy pitcher, played by Tim Robbins, exults as he comes into the dugout after a strong inning of work. As he does so, his catcher, veteran baseball lifer Crash Davis, played by Kevin Costner, chews him out for all the […]
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Make’s it official then. Abbot and Costello’s seminal “Who’s on First” routine was selected by Vulture as among the “The 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy.” The jokes are listed in chronological order, not by funniest. In fact the title of the piece makes no promise along those lines. From the Vulture commentary: No single […]
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The Baseball Hall of Fame will shortly announce who, if any, of the gents on the current ballot will be measured for a new plaque. Forget the animus towards the players — I have never witnessed the bad feelings that have been expressed recently between the writers. Most of the latest comes towards Murray Chass, […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
I’ll be the judge of that
January 6, 2017
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 […]
Tagged as: baseball fiction
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