Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
(Note: I published this piece on one of my other blogs, The Worried Journalist. Just call me Double-Duty Kaplan.) When I was a kid I once got in in trouble for spending twice my allowance because I bought the latest issues of Baseball Digest and The Sporting News on the way back from running errands. […]
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Baseball America recently announced the release of their new release, their Ultimate Draft Book: The Most Comprehensive Book Ever Published on the Baseball Draft: 1965-2016. Don’t you love their modesty? Did you know that more than 70,000(!) players have been selected since the inception of the draft? Picture a full stadium, and then some. Impressive.
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One of the last “Boys of Summer,” Branca probably knew how his obituary would begin immediately after he gave up “the shot heard round the world” to Bobby Thomson. This was the topic of Joshua Prager’s The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World. Here’s […]
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Tyler Kepner published this story in today’s NY Times about the new batch of players eligible for Hall of Fame consideration. I totally agree with his assessment that most of these fellows will not meet the five-percent of votes needed to remain on next year’s ballot. The only names that jumps out as a possible/probable […]
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Spitball — “The Literary baseball Magazine” — recently announced the slate of finalists for the 2016 CASEY Award: The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports by Jeff Passan The Baseball Whisperer: A Small-Town Coach Who Shaped Big League Dreams by Michael Tackett Bucky F*cking Dent (novel) by David Duchovny Game […]
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NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on […]
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Brought to you by the good folks at Pinstripe Alley. The entry includes such titles as Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, by Richard Ben Cramer The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, by Buster Olney The Yankee Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter, by Ian O’Connor All […]
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Goodness knows they deserve it given their long history of going without a championship, but how many new Cubs books are too many? Actually, even their failures have done well for them in terms of literature. There have been almost as many titles — if not more — lamenting their shortcomings as there have been […]
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NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on […]
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FWIW=For what it’s worth, BTW (by the way). Not a big fan of baseball fiction but I do like the notion of time travels so this one caught my eye. My eye was released when I read that the protagonist is a mild-mannered CPA (is there any other kind?), just like the author. I do […]
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NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on […]
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What is it, two days after the Cubs won the series and while compiling the (usually) weekly list of baseball best-sellers, there are publications about the team that weren’t even listed when I did my search for items coming down the pike (although, to be strictly accurate, I was basically looking at 2017 items). So […]
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According to this piece from Deadspin, “Give Theo Epstein And Bill Murray A Buddy Cop Movie, Now.” Just, please, no Daffy Duck voices. Yesterday’s Pardon the Interruption hailed Epstein as not among the pantheon of great baseball executives, but the pantheon of great baseball executives. You can listen to the podcast version here and then […]
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So if that was indeed his last major league game, David Ross hit a home run in his final official at bat last night. That it came in the seventh game of a World Series that gave the Chicago Cubs and their long-suffering fans a championship for the first time since Teddy Roosevelt was president […]
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I previously posted on books about the World Series and the Cubs and Indians. Here’s a story from the Chicago Tribune on how the local booksellers and libraries are having a grand time of it all.
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Because as soon as you write about it, it’s no longer untold, is it? Maybe it was before you told it, Sherman Jenkins, but now it’s not. So does that mean he has to change the title? “Aurora resident authors book about ‘untold’ baseball All Star, Globetrotter.” The book in question is Ted Strong Jr.: […]
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NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on […]
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Marty Appel, who knows a thing or two about baseball, New York, and literature, recently contributed this article about the 75 baseball titles that earned recognition as a New York Times best-seller to the online National Pastime Museum. There might be a little local bias here: 33 of the titles were written by or about […]
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It’s an travel day today. Aren’t you glad they stared the game am hour early yesterday because of perilous weather? If not — and assuming the same length of four hours and four minutes — it would have ended after midnight. So I thought I’d save you some time and offering links to some of […]
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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
