Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
The end of January already?? Where did the time go? Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally […]
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Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, by Paul Goldberger (Knopf, 2019) Like a lot of New Year’s resolutions, this one didn’t make it past the fourth week. Just got too hard to sustain. Plus I had to prepare for my talk on Garden State All-Stars for the Northern New Jersey Chapter’s SABR Day event, during […]
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Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one […]
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The latest batch of cheating accusations and ensuing scandals? This isn’t the first time complaints about the use of technology have been raised. I wrote about this over a decade ago and it seems like an appropriate time to revisit the conversation I had with Joshua Prager, author of The Echoing Green: The Untold Story […]
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Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one […]
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Bill James Handbook 2020 (Acta Sports 2019) Like the game itself, James has come a long way since his Abstracts of the late seventies and early eighties. He has grown into the guru of analytics. He has changed the way we look at the game, not just relying on “baseball card stats.” But can you […]
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No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing, by Joe Bonomo (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) There are a handful of people I would love to have on as a guest for a Bookshelf Conversation, the podcast segment of this blog: James Earl Jones, Dennis Haysbert, John Thorn and, […]
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For the Good of the Game: The Inside Story of the Surprising and Dramatic Transformation of Major League Baseball, by Bud Selig with Phil Rogers There’s a scene in the movie Lincoln, in which the president, working on a telegram in the middle of the night during a watershed moment of the Civil War, asks […]
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Now Taking the Field: Baseball’s All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises, by Tom Stone (ACTA Sports, 2019) If you’re looking for an argument, this is a good place to start. Stone has done diligence, not only in compiling the figures but by fine-tuning his picks with keen observations that may or may not hold […]
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First entry of the new decade. Hubba-hubba. Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over […]
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The Ultimate Boston Red Sox Time Machine Book, by Martin Gitlin (Lyons Press, 2020) Why is it the older I get, the more events that transpired recently become “history.” Oh, wait, 1967. I guess that’s not exactly recent. But books like Time Machine serve to make me feel old. Congrats. And you know how I […]
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The Comic Book Story of Baseball: The Heroes, Hustlers, and History-Making Swings (and Misses) of America’s National Pastime, by Alex Irvine with Tomm Coker and C.P. Smith A brief one today. I fear these things are becoming unsustainable, but we’ll see. I first came across the work of Alex Irvine with his short “speculative” piece, […]
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First entry of the new decade. Hubba-hubba. Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over […]
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There are some people for whom you know how the first line of their obituary will read. Don Larsen is one those. The only man to throw a perfect game in a World Series died yesterday at the age of 90. (Four cents!) Richard Goldstein in The New York Times: Don Larsen, an otherwise ordinary […]
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Hard to believe this is the last BBS entry for the year; where did the time go? Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, […]
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Well, the good thing about late December and the beginning of winter is that by the time next week’s list rolls around, the days will be getting longer. Wouldn’t it make sense to have the shortest day in the middle of the season, and the longest somewhere in August? But I digress… Note: The Amazon […]
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Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one […]
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Because you can keep a donut on your bookshelf (but not for too long). Since I mentioned my work at Trader Joe’s in the previous post and I am working on a piece from Sunday’s New York Times in their special section “How the ‘Babe Ruth of Cookies’ Brought Us a Dozen Dazzling Holiday Recipes,” I […]
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Happy Pre-Thanskgiving, everyone. There are a lot of great baseball books published over the past year for which we can be thankful. And now it’s time to start thinking about which tityles you want to give or receive. So much from which to choose! On with the usual business: Note: The Amazon rankings are updated […]
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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
