Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Zev Chafets, author of Cooperstown Confidential, published this Op-Ed piece in the June 19 edition of The New York Times (“Let steroids into the Hall of Fame“). will Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, et al now become loyal Times readers? [T]oday’s superstars have lawyers and a union. They know how to use the news media. And […]
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books on baseball, that is, at least according to this blogger. The list includes: The Kid from Tomkinsville The Southpaw The Glory of Their Times Stealing Home The Bill James Historical Abstract
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Bobby Feller’s generation complained about the high salaries of the players that came after them. Now Wade Boggs speaks for the players from his era on the steroiders and their possible entry into the Hall of Fame. Can chicken be considered a performance enhancing food? Come to think of it what about that? Why are […]
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According to this item by Don McKee in the Philadelphia Inquirer: In case you have to buy a present for someone you really don’t like much, take a look at Selena Roberts’ unauthorized biography of Alex Rodriguez. According to the Associated Press, A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez has been a major disappointment. Since […]
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Yes, according to this post from The Tao of Stieb, a Toronto-based blog. Last month, we had some time to kill at a Chapters megastore….What we were met with was depressing enough to make us literally (and I mean literally) recoil and walk away. The baseball section was a wall that was almost completely filled […]
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I love Pardon the Interruption, and not just because the show tends to tend to agree with my point of view and vice versa. On yesterday’s show, Messers Wilbon and Kornheiser weighed in on the Raul Ibanez steroids situation, which I had addressed earlier in the afternon. (Funny, but the whole situation stemmed from a […]
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The writer of this interesting piece by Clark Booth in the Dorchester Reporter brings up a good point: Why do we need so many books on the same subjects, such as the Boston Red Sox in 1978? It’s been said lately that the strings are being pulled tightly in the publishing industry. Several factors are […]
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Owen Canfield, a former full-time columnist and sports editor of The Hartford Courant, focuses his now-monthly columnon books about ballplayers whose accomplishments go beyond the ball park. The first is Ira Berkow’s The Corporal Was a Pitcher, the Courage of Lou Brissie. The second is a book on five CDs, Clemente, the Passion and Grace […]
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Keith Olberman writes the “Baseball Nerd” under the MLB.blogs banner. In this entry, he takes Curt Smith to task for an error in Pull Up a Chair, his new biography of legendary Dodgers announcer Vin Scully. Olberman, who makes his living being contrary, used to be a baseball book reviewer in a former life. “[O]ne […]
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Loathe as I am to get dirty with the A-Rod book, I feel I would be derelict in my “duty” to ignore it. So we’ll try to make this as painless as possible. I’m still waiting for my copy, so I’m just passing along what I’ve read. The news falls into three basic camps: those […]
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Charles McGrath penned this interesting comparison of good v. evil, aka Yankees v. Red Sox in today’s Week in Review section in the Sunday Times. Specifically, he talks about the differences in the ballparks. The New Yankees home, “with its vast, mall-like spaces, its temples of conspicuous consumption, feels like something the ancient Romans might […]
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I always enjoy finding pieces on baseball lit from unexpected sources. Here’s one more. The question stemmed from a previous entry on the Alyssa Milano book.
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This entry on Officiating.com refers George F. Will’s column on Bruce Weber’s new book, As They See ‘Em. Strictly speaking, it is not, as the title asserts, a paean for umpires, but rather dap for the book.
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The Yankee game was on TV last night and I noticed from the centerfield shot that many of the seats behind the plate were vacant. At first I just chalked it up to the early hour; people probably hadn’ arrived yet. I subsequently switched to the Mets game and thought no more of it. Until […]
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The Seattle Literature Examiner posted this piece on the best baseball books that doesn’t so much list or review in itself, save for a mention of Baseball and Philosophy, as it does point to two existing lists, which I replicate here: Baseball Books: A Reading List, via The New York Times (1997-2003 titles) “Baseball fiction […]
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And when it comes to sportswriting, the forecast doesn’t appear too rosy, at least according to this well-done essay from the Pitchers and Poets (motto: “Both have their moments”) blog. Eric, the author of the entry titled “On Writing, Baseball Writing, and the 21st Century,” concludes the thought-provoker, If Jim Bouton was on today’s version […]
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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
* New York, New York: A "Freaky" assessment
June 29, 2009
From Stephen J. Dubner on The New York Times‘ Freakonomics blog (It’s okay; the original Freakonomics still sits on my bookshelf), this assessment of the decline of Western civilization, as evidenced by the boorish behavior of fans at last night’s interleague game between the Mets and Yankees.
Tagged as: Freakonomics, Mets, Yankees
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