Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a catch. I stopped playing competitive softball almost five years ago. Then COVID (I actually bought a Pitchback for the yard and used it maybe a couple of times). Then the accident (the resulting arm injuries make it painful to throw). So I was a bit […]
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While I was chatting with Jon Leonoudakis about his latest documentary, Ball Four Turns 40, I remembered that one of my earliest interviews was with Jim Bouton. This was in the pre-Covid, Pre-Zoom days when I was doing everything on a digital tape recorder over the phone or in person (and the fidelity or lack […]
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Tom Hoffarth and I are kindred spirits. For more than a decade, the former sports columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News produced, among many other things, the great feature “30 books in 30 days”; here’s just one entry on it from the Bookshelf. As you can see, these were more than just book reviews, […]
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Our old friend, Curt Smith, weighs in on the top contenders for the 2023 Frick Award, bestowed by the Baseball Hall of Fame to a broadcaster for “major contributions to baseball,” in Sports Business Journal. Of course, I’m biased and am hoping that the Mets’ Gary Cohen gets the honor, but I’m sure the other […]
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I’ve said it time and again here: I am not a huge fan of posting about baseball fiction. I just feel unqualified to opine on the details since I lack the educational background to parse about it with any degree of confidence or even intelligence. That said, when I learned about the topic of The […]
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It wasn’t until I decided to ask Ira Berkow on to discuss his latest book, Baseball’s Best Ever: A Half Century of Covering Hall of Famers, that I remembered that he wrote the foreword to The Jewish Olympics: The History of the Maccabiah Games (which violates one of my own rules for titles: it should […]
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So after the year I’ve had, I decided to bite the bullet and venture down to SABR 50, the annual convention that should have been held in 2020 but, well, you know… I have to say, it wasn’t without a bit of trepidation. Driving was out of the question so Amtrak it was. I love […]
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There is little that I can offer that would be as eloquent as what others have said and written about the legendary broadcaster who passed away Tuesday at the age of 94. From what I know, Scully was a modest person and a real mensch. He declined to tell his own story and was almost […]
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When my daughter decided she wanted to go into photography as a career, I was worried. Since everyone who has a smartphone is a photographer now, how are you going to make any money off that? But not everyone who has the ability to use a camera phone has the talent to make their shots […]
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He blinded me with science! Never a strong suit of mine in school, and normally I would stay away from any book that would remind me of that failing, but Will Carroll‘s latest book does have baseball in the title so… Carroll has long been the go-to guy for all things injury-related (his Twitter handle […]
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Somewhere in the attic, among all the boxes of baseball material, are a stack of scorecards and programs I’ve used over the years. The first one was from a Mets-Pirates game in 1966. It has the unsophisticated scrawls you’d expect from a nine-year-old who hadn’t yet learned the “right way” to record what was going […]
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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 Bookshelf Conversation #153: Paul Aron
October 17, 2022
Kudos to Paul Aron and the decision to name his newest project The Lineup: Ten Books That Changed Baseball. No superlatives, no grandiose claims, but a much more modest approach. And, indeed, these are books that not only changed the sport, but in some cases — as Aron explains both within the pages and our conversation […]
Tagged as: baseball books, Paul Aron
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