Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
I did a post about self-published books awhile back, specifically Mike Gallagher’s The Diamond Deception and how I would pass on it. Kudos to Doug Smith at the Towanda News for devoting the time to reading the novel and writing a review. For me, he sums up my thoughts about such projects thusly: Deception’s” devil […]
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Switched over to a new podcasting plug-in. Not working exactly as I had hoped. The best I can do at the moment is link to it this way: hear the podcast here. Apologies for the extra click. * * * You can’t find any listing of the best baseball (or sports) fiction without finding Eric […]
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* I love a good deconstruction story. Here, author Dayn Perry joyously breaks down a number of baseball cards he recently purchased. * The Columbus, Indiana, Republic posted this glowing review of Doug WIlson’s The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych. * The Santa Monica Mirror published a profile of local writer Alan […]
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Burton Boxerman, co-author with his wife, Bonita, of the two-volume Jews and Baseball series published by McFarland a few years back, published this review of Larry Ruttman’s American Jews and America’s Game: Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball in Baseball in a recent edition of the St. Louis Jewish Light. As an ye shall […]
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Our long national holiday being over, it’s time to get back to work. Had the opportunity to finish (and re-finish) a couple of baseball books over the last few days. I found Doc, the memoirs of fallen super-ace Dwight Gooden, a frustrating experience. On the one hand I thought it was a great self-assessment of […]
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Troy Soos, author of the excellent Mikey Rawlings series of historical baseball fiction that’s currently in re-release, posted this on Facebook a little while ago: Excerpts from MURDER AT WRIGLEY FIELD appear in an editorial in today’s Sacramento Bee. I never imagined my World War I baseball mystery would be cited in a contemporary debate […]
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One author that frequently comes up in comments about who I neglected in 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die is John Tunis, who published a series of books for younger reader about fictitious players for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The list includes: The Kid from Tomkinsville, 1940 Keystone Kids, 1943 World Series, 1944 […]
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Nuckolball posted a review of Robert Creamer’s classic bio, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. These are kind of like mini-reviews, so I’m including Baseball Nation’s piece on “Your favorite baseball books,” which includes, among others, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball […]
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With all due respect to the author… I found an item on my Google alerts about The Diamond Deception, a self-published novel by Mike Gallagher. Rather than try to describe it, here’s the “official” notice: FBI hero Pete Dobbins, goes undercover as a major league baseball player to investigate a string of murders and gets […]
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It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but congratulations to Charles P. of Long Island City, winner of the randomly selected, infrequent book giveaway selection, The Might Have Been: A Novel by Joseph Schuster. Next up — and in a quicker fashion, I promise — Mike Piazza’s Long Shot.
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Shane Tourtellotte at The Hardball Times, offers a thought-provoking series about “alternate baseball” series in which he posits what might have been had Abner Graves received credit for “inventing” the national pastime; Willie Mays as manager of the (New Jersey) Yankees thanks to a change of fortunes for the Harlem Globetrotters; and how Lou Gehrig’s […]
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by Frank Nappi, 2012, Skyhorse. Nappi continues the story of 18-year-old pitching sensation toiling for the 1949 minor league Milwaukee Brewers, whom he introduced in his 2008 publication, The Legend of Mickey Tussler.` If Tussler doesn’t have many the problems associated with a youngster trying to fit in with a group of older men in […]
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Larry Ruttman, a fellow UNP author, is about to publish American Jews and America’s Game: Voices of a Growing Legacy in Baseball, a collection of interviews. James Bailey, my main”competitor,” posted this abbreviated list of what he considers some classic of baseball fiction, include some obscure titles not associated with the superlative, wish as Season […]
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With so many books I haven’t gotten to, I find it almost wasteful to reread books I’ve enjoyed (who would revisit one they didn’t enjoy? That’s like saying “this is a picture of me when I was younger.” As the late comedian Mitch Hedberg once said, “Every picture of you is when you were younger.” […]
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Let’s have a series about fictional players. And who better to compile them then Gary Cieradkowski whose latest features Henry “Author” Wiggen, the hero of such Mark Harris classics as Bang the Drum Slowly, The Southpaw, A Ticket for a Seamstitch, and It Looked Like For Ever. Here’s a roster of “The 25 Greatest Fictional […]
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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
