Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
A Documentary of the Game of Baseball, by Branch Rickey with Robert Riger. Simon and Schuster, 1965. I discovered this gem on the Facebook “Baseball Book” Group. Had I known about this beforehand, I probably would have included it in my forthcoming 501 Books Baseball Fans Must Read Before They Die. Rickey, who served in […]
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Some vacation. Actually it was no vacation at all. This is the first time since Aug. 1 I’ve been upright, pain-free, and clear-headed enough to post. Following my 11-seconds of fame as one of the first-pitch-throwers at a Trenton Thunder game, I’ve been suffering with a respiratory infection that had me feverish, coughing, and otherwise […]
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Interesting premise. Just one of several though-provokers in Bad Sports, by Dave Zirin. Not exactly sure why a review of a two-year old book was posted on the Los Angeles Review of Books site at this time (other than the fact that it was recently released as a paperback), but here it is. And while […]
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(Update: I do not have a middle name. My parents were very poor. So sometimes I fiddle around with one to see what kind of junk mail it engenders. The latest one is “Fitzgerald.”) Spent the day at the BookExpo America at the Javitz Center in Manhattan. It’s always fun to see what the industry […]
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Baseball Reflections posted this review of Ozzie’s School of Management: Lessons from the Dugout, the Clubhouse, and the Doghouse.
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If you’re so inclined, skip the best-selling edition (Fifty Shades of Grey, anyone?) and dig into this: The 2012-16 Collective Bargaining Agreement. Hours of endless entertainment. Or you can wait for the movie to come out. (Hey, if they did it for Moneyball…)
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A periodic attempt to catch up on recent items and links. ♦ I love this entry by SB Nation’s Grant Brisbee on the 17-inning game between the Red Sox and Orioles on May 6 because it’s so damn literary, comparing the sportswriter’s hyperbole to the epic storyteller. ♦ And this one brief from The Hardball […]
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This deserves an entry all of its own. The last books in Tom Hoffarth’s 30/30 feature include: Willie Mays Aikens: Safe at Home, by Gregory Jordan. Upshot: Hoffarth’s title for the piece — Aiken’s journey from a prison sentence to a whole lot of paragraphs, correctly punctuated — belies his wrap, in which he describes […]
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♦ The Knoxville News published this review of native son R.A. Dickley’s Wherever I Wind Up. Upshot: “t is rare to find a baseball book by an insider that dishes no dirt. It is even rarer to find a professional athlete willing to acknowledge his own mistakes. In “Wherever I Wind Up,” R.A. Dickey reveals […]
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These programs are supposed to take you “deep inside” the organization’s but I watched the Giants version last year. Meh. Kudos to the team for giving such access. The Guillen suspension for his Castro remarks are already there. HBO couldn’t have known ahead of time how that drama would play out. (Although the cynic in […]
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Because you can keep a TV on a bookshelf: Although I actually prefer the shorter version: Love the eye-roll when the Cubs’ fan refers to the “elegantly-coiffed ex-governor.”
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The two small publishing houses that comprise most of the high-brow literature about the National pastime both got a little love recently. David Davis wrote this nice company profile in The New York Times on the University of Nebraska Press, which will be putting out my 501 book next year (God willing). Rob Neyer over […]
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♦ Bill Jordan at Baseball Reflections on Tim Wendel’s Summer of 68. ♦ Tom Hoffarth kicked off his annual “30 book in 30 days” feature yesterday with Baseball Prospectus 2012. Today’s book is Trading Manny: How a Father & Son Learned to Love Baseball Again, by Jim Gullo. (Here’s another review from The Oregonian.) ♦ Sticking […]
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Baseball Reflections posted this review of High Fives, Pennant Drives, and Fernandomania: A Fan’s History of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Glory Years (1977-1981), by Paul Haddad. Just in time for Opening Day in Japan (which just passed. Sorry for the late post): baseball terms in Japanese! Another late post: GQ ran this profile on broadcasting […]
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Another story about the death of the baseball card industry, via CBS News Sunday Morning. The segment features Dave Jamieson, author of Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession. (Click here for the Bookshelf interview with Jamieson.) Back in the day, before they became part of an investment portfolio, kids used to stick […]
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Several new titles arrived over the past week including: Before the Curse: The Chicago Cubs’ Glory Years, 1870-1945, by Randy Roberts and Carson Cunningham A People’s History of Baseball, by Mitchell Nathanson Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, by Paul Dickson (Of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary fame) The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball […]
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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
Bits and pieces
August 30, 2012
Time for the occasional declutter of the accumulated links and stories, so here goes. “Dan Barry’s Bottom of the 33rd has won the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, which honors a nonfiction book on the subject of sports.” More here. From the Yogi Berra Museum: Former Yankee star second baseman Bobby Richardson, a cornerstone […]
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