Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Recall if you will the scene in The Pride of the Yankees in which Lou Gehrig follows Babe Ruth’s promise to hit a home run in the World Series for “sick Little Billy” with two blasts of his own. Fast forward to earlier this week and the Chicago Cubs’ Anthony Rizzo. (If the video below […]
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Not to mention redesign the score books. You hear a number of sports pundits clamoring about throwing out the records of those who have used performance enhancing drugs. But really, everyone knows how impractical that would be. What would become of the record books? Since baseball is a zero sum game, if you take away […]
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Unless you’re too injured. I don’t know about you, but I think the Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game is a colossal waste of time. As power-hitting professional athletes, hitting batting practice speed balls, you should expect them to hit it over the wall. But the upshot is injury. The Colorado Rockies’ Justin Morneau, […]
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As Douglas MacArthur once said, “I have returned.” Visiting the San Francisco area for vacation was relaxing, apart from driving on California 1… Fortunately, we were going north, so oncoming traffic was on the left and inland was on the right. If we had been going south it would have been oncoming on the left […]
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I am working on a “Bookshelf Conversation” podcast with Heather Quinlan, producer of a new documentary about the 1986 New York Mets. Quinlan is trying to raise $50,000 for her project via Kickstarter. (There are similar sites , but who has time to go through them all? Perhaps this will motivate you to investigate further.) […]
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Two Steve Travers titles — The 1969 Miracle Mets: The Improbable Story of the World’s Greatest Underdog Team and A Tale Of Three Cities: New York, L.A. and San Francisco in October of ‘62 — are currently available at no charge in various e-reader formats on Smashwords.
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Baseball books. ’nuff said.
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Big surprise: baseball games take longer than they used to. The Mets played three straight “overtimers” that went into extra innings against the Philadelphia Phillies this weekend. The NY Times included this item (—>) comparing the trio of contests to the last time this occurred, in 1975 against the Chicago Cubs: Note that the first […]
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To: NY Times book section editors RE: Selections of sports books reviewed I guess technically this is still basketball season, what with the playoffs and all. But really, does any other sport begin with the poetry that heralds the beginning of the new baseball campaign? It may be cliched to say, but it is s […]
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And it’s even literary, technically.
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My daughter, Rachel, a photography major at NYU’s Tisch School, has been taking commencement pictures for the university’s newspaper since she was a freshman. She particularly likes doing the all-school program held at Yankee Stadium. But I don’t think any of the previous ceremonies thrilled her more than yesterday when future Hall of Famer Mariano […]
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Mookie Wilson has a new book coming out, so… Mookie Wilson on Life After the Mets
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Over the past several days I’ve posted twice about Lou Gehrig, including his role inn the B-western film Rawhide. So what was in yesterday’s NY Times? When the Iron Horse (Almost) Played Tarzan
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While looking through the NY Times Sunday book section, I found this essay, “Which Books From Your Past Do You Read Now With Ambivalence?” To be honest, I didn’t read it. Who has time? But it does raise an interesting question which I put to you, but regarding baseball titles. Some people have gone back […]
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There are several excellent bits featuring of baseball cliches, not the least of which is this scene from Bull Durham: I previous wrote about The Final Four of Everything, focusing on Dan Okrent’s greatest Jewish baseball Players and Will Leitch’s greatest sports writers. Now it’s time for Sports Cliches, a contribution by Sports Illustrated‘s Steve […]
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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
Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice…
March 20, 2014
In these times of e-publishing, the old saw, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” might no longer be valid. Oftentimes if you see an e-book with a nondescript cover, it’s a pretty good indicator of what lies within its “pages.” More traditionally, reviewers receive galleys or ARCs — advance reading copies — sent […]
Tagged as: Doug Harvey, Kostya Kennedy, Pete Rose, Peter Golenbock
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