Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
This piece by Rob Neyer on Baseball Nation relates to two recent entries on the Bookshelf, one about Tim McCarver calling it a broadcast career, the other about the poor job FOX does producing the World Series. Among my favorite passages from Neyer: About Tim McCarver’s Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans: “There are […]
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Regardless of your opinion of Tim McCarver, endings are almost always sad. Last night’s World Series finale was the swan song of his broadcasting career. I especially appreciate McCarver’s comment that his goals as a broadcaster included “teaching you something you may not have known about this great game.” He’s done that on the air […]
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Brought to you by the folks at Mental Floss, the magazine that gave me my first national exposure and cover story (right). Have these World Series matchups ever happened? (Not to brag but I aced it.) The Baseball Card Brand Quiz (a lot tougher; ugh, I only scored 64%, which was slightly higher than the […]
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In The Baseball Uncyclopedia: A Highly Opinionated, Myth-Busting Guide to the Great American Game, authors Michael Kun and Howard Bloom write about the state of baseball literature.According to their calculations, there are: Books about the Yankees. Books about the Red Sox. Books about the Yankees and the Redd Sox. Books about players who played for […]
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It’s a bit too pricey for me, but I’m sure some of you out there can spring for it. Here’s a four-day trip to Cooperstown during next year’s Induction Week July 31- Aug. 3), with all the fixin’s, starting at $4,390. Bear in mind the candidates for induction include a number of high profile names […]
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Baseball Nation posted this appreciation of “The 10 greatest World Series program covers,” beginning with I’m kind of partial to this one, which came in at No. 4 in Jim Baker’s list:
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MLB.com’s Paul hagen posted this review of the new You Gotta Have Heart: A History of Washington Baseball from 1859 to the 2012 National League East Champions, by Frederic Frommer, son of the peripatetic baseball author Harvey Frommer.
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The grandson of the controversial Hall of Famer will speak at at the Grant Brimhall Library, 1401 E. Janss Road, Thousand Oaks, Calif., on Saturday, Oct. 19 , at 2 p.m. Cobb is the author of Heart of a Tiger: Growing up with My Grandfather, Ty Cobb. I have not read the book yet — […]
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That Don Larsen threw his World Series perfect game. Holy cow, as Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto — who did not appear in that game — might say, they haven’t even finished the Division Series yet. Books about this singular event include: The Perfect Yankee: The Incredible Story of the Greatest Miracle in Baseball History, by […]
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Dan Gilbert, author of Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency, will be the featured speaker at the next Varsity Letters event hosted by Gelf Magazine on Thursday, Oct. 10, at 7:30 p.m. at The Gallery at LPR, 158 Bleecker St. Gilbert, will be joined by Michael O’Keeffe, Teri Thompson, and […]
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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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Ain’t it funny how time slips away? Baseball artist Graig Kreindler reminded his Facebook friends that today is the 62nd anniversary of Bobby Thomson’s ‘Shot heard ’round the world.” There have been several books — both fiction and non- — marking this historic event, including, in no particular order: The Echoing Green: The Untold Story […]
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Multiple Cy-Young winner Pedro Martinez will release his eponymous memoir, Pedro, next spring. The book, co-written by the Boston Herald’s Michael Silverman, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The family of Roberto Clemente has collaborated on Clemente: The True Legacy of an Undying Hero, was released last month. The book was the Hall of Famer’s […]
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Haven’t done one of these in awhile. * The Washington Times posted this one on Willard Mullin’s Golden Age of Baseball: Drawings 1934-1972, edited by Hal Bock and Michael Powers. * WTOP in Washington DC ran this story and audio interview on Fred Frommer’s You Gotta Have Heart: A History of Washington Baseball from 1859 […]
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In a scene from the film version of Eight Men Out, Albert Austrian, the crackerjack attorney hired by Chicago White/Black Sox owner Charles Comiskey to defend his wayward players, is introducing his law partners to the defendants: Austrian: Their names may not sound familiar, but I’d say that these men are the Ty Cobb, the […]
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To steal a line from a regular segment of Pardon the Interruption. Baseball Nation reminds us (okay, reminded me) that today is the 105th anniversary of Merkle’s Boner. Hopefully, this is drumming up some renewed interest in Mike Cameron’s empathetic biography, Public Bonehead, Private Hero: The Real Legacy of Baseball’s Fred Merkle, which is included […]
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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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As we approach the tragic anniversary , here’s a new book that examines Baseball after 9/11: Six Nights That Helped Heal America, by Patrick Carney. I read the sample via Amazon but couldn’t get a sense of that quality of the book, which is only 31 pages. Still, it’s less than $3, so maybe it’s […]
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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
How the Grinch stole SI‘s “Top 10 postseason walk-off home runs” joy
October 10, 2013
In this case I am the Grinch; I am the one who knocks…Ben Reiter’s list on SI.com, written after the Tampa Bay Rays’ Jose Lobaton beat the Boston Red Sox with a walk-off on Monday night. I think you would agree that the most exciting situations are one where there’s no tomorrow, where everything is […]
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