Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Hey, if A-Rod can do it, why not Bud? Commissioner Selig has said he wants to write a book when he retires. For you Yankee and home run fans, this looks interesting: New York Yankees Home Runs: A Comprehensive Factbook, 1903-2012, by Mitchell S. Soivenski. It should not be surprising that this is a McFarland […]
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Danny Peary, author or coauthor of numerous baseball titles including Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero and Cult Baseball Players: The Greats, the Flakes, the Weird and the Wonderful among many others, was unable to add this comment in response to yesterday’s post, “All he is saying, is give Rose a chance,” about Kostya Kennedy’s commentary […]
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Simply put, Baseball is on the downslide vs. Baseball is still the National game. Discuss.
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The New Yorker posted this interesting piece on “Christy Mathewson and the Thinking Man’s Game” (although in the body of the article, it does refer to the more PC “thinking person”). The article by Luke Epplin refers to several books, including Mathewson’s “memoir,” Pitching in a Pinch: Baseball from the Inside — recently re-released by […]
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The New York Times published two pieces recently about baseball (outside the usual stuff) about aspects of love and ambivalence. The first, by Karen Crouse, considers the marriage between Oakland As rookie Nate Freiman and golfer Amanda Blumenherst and how their athletic careers were keeping them apart. So Blumenherst, has been playing her sport since […]
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There’s a line in the film version of The Natural in which the following exchange occurs between Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) and the unctuous sportswriter Max Mercy (Robert Duvall): Hobbs: Did you ever play ball, Max? Mercy: No, never have. But I make it a little more fun to watch, you see. And after today, […]
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Josh Levin of Slate’s Hang Up and Listen podcast posted this educational piece on “The Worst Baseball Card of All Time.” Spoiler alert: It’s Bob Hamlin in the 1996 Pinnacle Foil set (card no. 289). Levin’s essay makes some very good arguments and offers a mini-history lesson on the industry, full of links to examples […]
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There are a few podcasts I listen to on a regular basis, including NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and Pop Culture Happy Hour and Pardon the Interruption (when I can’t catch up on the DVR). Recently I’ve added ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, hosted by Buster Olney, to that elite group. To be frank, a lot […]
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Last week I posted this entry on Tom Shieber’s frame-by-frame analysis to say “yea” or “nay” (sort of) to the urban legend that Gary Cooper’s baseball action while portraying Lou Gehrig was inverted since the actor was a natural righty (I wonder: there’s a scene where Gehrig is signing a ball for sick little Billy […]
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Found a couple of baseball items in this weekend’s New York Times, but not in the usual place (i.e., the sports section). In the Sunday Magazine, The Ethicist‘s Chuck Klosterman weighed in on the rights of ownership when it comes to foul ball distribution. In the Week in Review section, Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The […]
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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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Based on The Art of Fielding‘s faux book-with-the-book conceit, Derrick Goold, who hosts the Bird Land blog on Stltoday.com, held a contest to see if his readers could add to the bits of philosophy included in TAOF, which was written by the protagonist’s hero, “a former Cardinals shortstop who reigned as the greatest glove in […]
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Not by me (at least not yet), but via a “book club” effort by the always thoughtful Pitchers and Poets blog. They started this “event” Sept. 21 (shows how long I’ve been out of circulation), so if you start from the beginning you’ll be working a bit awkwardly out of sequence, but it’s worth it. […]
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A Critical Study, by Kathleen Sullivan. McFarland, 2005. Novels and feature films tend to find comfort in stock characters. Stories about celebrities in particular focus on two or three types of women. You have your temptress who, for various reasons, wants to keep the protagonist from succeeding at his mission. For baseball materials you have […]
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The good news: More than half way to the goal of 501 books. The bad news: it takes me away from the blog. Oh well, hang around. It will be worth it in the end. In the meantime, here are a few items for your consideration: Out of Left Field, Rebecca Alpert’s history of Jewish […]
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Who better than a fellow athlete to appreciate what it takes to make it to a milestone? Doug Glanville, author of The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View, wrote this piece for The New York Times.
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Since I don’t know if you folks get to the comments portion of the program, I thought I’d post these remarks about the issue of memoirs submitted by Bill Lewers — whose book I reviewed in December — as a stand alone entry.It seems Genzlinger’s comments in the Times‘ Sunday Book Review on the relative […]
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Harvey Araton published this sweet tribute to these veteran sportswriters who passed away over the last few months. While I didn’t know Mr. Ziegel, I did have the pleasure of making Maury‘s acquaintance and though I didn’t have the same relationship with him as Araton, I did find him very open and charitable when it […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
In my most recent "day job," I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted another blog. Busy, busy, busy.
I did a profile piece on the award-winning cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
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
What if…
January 17, 2014
Saw this on Marty Appel‘s Facebook page: Ok, so I thought of this last night. It’s September 29, 2014. Yankees and Red Sox have tied for first in AL East and need to have a one-game playoff to see who wins the division. But wait, it is game #163…..A-Rod has served his 162 game suspension, […]
Tagged as: Alex Rodriguez, Marty Appel
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