Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Taking a page from his own book, Rob Neyer “challenges” some assertions by Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx from an article in a 1962 issue of Baseball Monthly. Note the title: BaseballFactCheck.org. No such site exists, but it should. Neyer could recruit some baseball scholars to bust myths. Just sayin’.
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Today marks the “official” beginning of American involvement in World War II, spurred by the attack on Pearl Harbor. There are several excellent books that note the toll the War took on the national pastime, as well as the role baseball had in keeping up the country’s morale. Among them: Spartan Seasons: How Baseball Survived […]
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The man responsible — for better or worse — for the astronomical salaries baseball players receive these days, died this morning at the age of 95. He had been battling cancer for more than a year. Miller was one of the most powerful men in sports during his tenure as head of the players union. […]
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♦ Bill Jordan at Baseball Reflections posted this on The Baseball Hall of Shame: The Best of Blooperstown. Upshot: “With the book being built around blurbs, instead of lengthy stories, it is a quick read and would be something that is easy to browse through. One might even call this a good book to read […]
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Spitball Magazine announced the finalists for the publications annual CASEY award for best baseball book of the year. The titles include: Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan, by Robert K. Fitts Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, by Paul Dickson Connie Mack: The Turbulent and Triumphant Years, 1915-1931, by […]
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The baseball “lifer” passed away on Nov. 8 at the age of 95. Here’s the NY Times obit, written by Richard Goldstein. MacPhail published his autobiography — My 9 Innings: An Autobiography of 50 Years in Baseball — in 1989. A new copy goes for about $150 on Amazon. in 2000, G. Richard McKelvey published […]
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♦ I’m including this piece just because I find it amusing. I hope the Brits don’t get all their baseball info like this. ♦ Who says fiction about the national pastime has to be confined to literature? Here’s a case of fictitious baseball merchandise. ♦ Dan Epstein, author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A […]
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Add Don Larsen to the list of former players who are putting up pieces of their legacies up for sale. According to this piece in the NY Jewish Week, Larsen will auction off the uniform he wore when he pitched his World Series perfect game in 1956. According to the story by Steve Lipman, “Besides […]
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(To borrow The New York Times‘ motto) Marty Appel recently revised his helpful list of baseball titles that have appeared on the Times‘ best-seller list. The article appears on the Sports Collectors Digest website. As Appel, a former PR director for the New York Yankees, notes there are several familiar books that are conspicuous in […]
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♦ The Washington Post published this piece on Tony La Russa’s memoir, One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season. ♦ Better late than never: It seems the Seattle Post-Intelligencer finally got around to posting a review of Zack Hample’s 2007 publication, Watching Baseball Smarter: […]
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♦ The Atlantic published this piece by Luke Epplin on Tony La Russa’s new book, The Last Strike. The main complaint in the piece seems to be that a) La Russa doesn’t dish the dirt very much; and b) his role as a great strategist may be well-deserved, but too much detail doesn’t make for […]
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Enjoyed reading a few … well, what to call them? They’re not exactly graphic novels since they deal with real-life figures.. Anyway… The first was 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, which is described as a graphic novel on the dust cover. Written/drawn by Wilfred Santiago and published by Fantographic Books last year, this is […]
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Conducted my semi-regular scan of new titles. Submitted for your interest. It may seem unfair, but I do tend to judge e-books by their cover, especially when they are offered only in that format. It’s an indication of the time and effort the author/publisher puts into the project. Similarly, I’m basing my opinions strictly on […]
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♦ The Summer 2012 issue of Jewish Currents features a review by Cynthia Werthamer of Pitching in the Promised Land: A Story of the First and Only Season in the Israel Baseball League, by former IBL hurler Aaron Pribble. Upshot: “While Pribble’s book could do with less foreshadowing…, his retelling of the ups and downs […]
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A Documentary of the Game of Baseball, by Branch Rickey with Robert Riger. Simon and Schuster, 1965. I discovered this gem on the Facebook “Baseball Book” Group. Had I known about this beforehand, I probably would have included it in my forthcoming 501 Books Baseball Fans Must Read Before They Die. Rickey, who served in […]
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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
Bits and pieces
August 30, 2012
Time for the occasional declutter of the accumulated links and stories, so here goes. “Dan Barry’s Bottom of the 33rd has won the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, which honors a nonfiction book on the subject of sports.” More here. From the Yogi Berra Museum: Former Yankee star second baseman Bobby Richardson, a cornerstone […]
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