Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Value Over Replacement Grit offers a baseball-themed crossword puzzle. At the risk of appearing sexist, I must say this is the first time I’ve encountered a woman who collects baseball cards with such a passion as Cee Angi, who wrote this mournful “Requiem for the 00s: The Decline of Topps Baseball Cards,” in which she […]
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Literary birthday greetings: Poor Feb. 1. It has a tough act act to follow with Jan. 31, which celebrates the arrival of such legends Jackie Robinson, Ernie Banks, and Nolan Ryan, who, between the three of them, have been the subjects of scores of books. Turns out there are no players who were born on […]
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It’s the Winter Baseball Meetings, which runs through Dec. 6 in Nashville (so I guess it doesn’t have to be a heavy overcoat). I came across this item from SB Nation about the meetings and it reminded me of Josh Lewin’s Getting in the Game: Inside Baseball’s Winter Meetings, published in 2003. Lewin, who currently […]
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Brought to you as a public service announcement. MLB.com is seeking stats stringers to cover these clubs in 2013 and beyond: Baltimore/DC (both clubs) Houston Kansas City Oakland/SF (both clubs) Philadelphia Pittsburgh San Diego Seattle Texas (Arlington) Toronto Stats stringers are responsible for digitally scoring games from the MLB ballparks, which provides the data used […]
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The man responsible — for better or worse — for the astronomical salaries baseball players receive these days, died this morning at the age of 95. He had been battling cancer for more than a year. Miller was one of the most powerful men in sports during his tenure as head of the players union. […]
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As this episode of ESPN’s Outside the Lines begins, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” This episode of the network’s sports documentary focuses on the most recent Marlin’s “fire sale,” with Jeffrey Loria the chief arsonist. The commentators note this is not the first time the art dealer/baseball owner […]
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♦ I’m including this piece just because I find it amusing. I hope the Brits don’t get all their baseball info like this. ♦ Who says fiction about the national pastime has to be confined to literature? Here’s a case of fictitious baseball merchandise. ♦ Dan Epstein, author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A […]
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First it was PunditTracker, which analyzed the proficiency of baseball experts in their preseason prognostications. Now it’s this Sam Miller article in Baseball Prospectus, which concentrates questions put to general managers over the course of nine years. Upshot: “[P]redicting baseball might just be impossible, and a team that puts too much faith in its own […]
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even if the games are never played. And even if they’re just paper printouts rather than traditional tickets. I don’t know why I expect pro sports businesses to “do the right thing.” It usually turns out to the bad. I guess I’m just too naive. My daughter decided at the last minute to go Game […]
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♦ The Washington Post published this piece on Tony La Russa’s memoir, One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season. ♦ Better late than never: It seems the Seattle Post-Intelligencer finally got around to posting a review of Zack Hample’s 2007 publication, Watching Baseball Smarter: […]
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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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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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