Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Several former Major Leaguers share a birthday today, including: Wade Boggs Boggs!The Techniques of Modern Hitting Billy Williams Billy Williams: My Sweet-Swinging Lifetime With the Cubs Babe Dahlgren Rumor in Town: A Grandson’s Promise to Right a Wrong
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To Thurman Munson, who would have been 63, believe it or not.
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Marc Tracy, who writes for the online Tablet magazine, publishes the Times‘ big baseball roundup, which appears in the June 6 issue. This year’s titles include: Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, a 50th anniversary reprinting (in book form) of John Updike’s iconic paean to Ted Williams in his last game Mint Condition, by Dave Jamieson […]
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My review of Bill Madden’s riveting profile of the Yankees owner was published on Bookreporter.com. You can read it here.
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Those who share my birthday include: The late Mike Coolbaugh, whose death from a line drive in a minor league game was achingly chronicled by S.L. Price in Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America. Lou Brissie, whose amazing comeback from devastating injuries suffered during World War II was the […]
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This top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, June 4. Title Rank General Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden 1 The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca 2 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, […]
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Yankees.baseball-news-update.com posted reviews of two titles: Dayn Perry’s Reggie Jackson, and 1921, by Spatz and Steinberg. While the writer deems both to be “serious and thoughtful volumes displaying highly impressive research…. neither book quite fully succeeds.” A celebrity first pitch I’d love to see: A profile in Smithsonian Magazine outs Harper Lee, author of the […]
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George Will put in an appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show in April (how did I miss that), to discuss the re-release of Men at Work, first published 20 years ago. Say what you will about Will’s politics, he loves his baseball and can discuss it without engaging in overly vainglorious verbosity. You can hear […]
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Former NY Times reporter Claire Smith will be the keynote speaker at the 22nd Annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, which kicks off (pardon the football metaphor) on Wednesday, June 2 and runs til Friday, June 4. Having attended one of these, I can tell you that it’s great fun, despite the scholarly […]
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I ran this Q&A with Gary Bedingfield, author and host Baseball in Wartime, last November in honor of Veteran’s Day. Thought I’d do post again to commemorate Memorial Day. In addition, I received a sweet little video recently which also has some WW II content. Around the League, 1939-1946 was filmed and later narrated by […]
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This top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, May 21. Title Rank General Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden 1 The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca 2 The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, […]
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The Life and Thunderous Career of Baseball’s Mr. October, by Dayn Perry. Morrow, 326 Pages, $25.99 Whatever words are used to describe Reginald Martinez Jackson, the Hall of Fame outfielder for the Oakland Athletics and New York Yankees (with less effectual stints on the Angels and Orioles), “complex” has to be among them. And that’s […]
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Two for the price of one this weekend, as the Times publishes an overview of Howard Bryant’s The Last Hero (“Much of this has been told before — most vividly in Aaron’s autobiography, “I Had a Hammer.” Written with Lonnie Wheeler and published in 1992, it explores the tangled theme of baseball and race with […]
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to Bobby Murcer, who would have been 64 today. He published Yankee for Life: My 40-Year Journey in Pinstripes, written with Glen Waggoner, shortly before his death. Also born this date, in 1921, “Prince” Hal Newhouser, subject of A Tiger in His Time: Hal Newhouser and the Burden of Wartime Ball, written by David M. […]
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to Reggie Jackson, born this date in 1946. Reggie (no last name necessary) has been the subject of several books, including Reggie Jackson: The Life and Thunderous Career of Mr. October, the just-released bio by Dayn Perry, which I’ll be reviewing for Bookreporter.com in the very near future. The Jackson collection includes: Also celebrating a […]
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Both the topics and the release dates of these books could be considered appropriate here. The first looks at Frank Deford’s The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball, while the second considers Mike Vacarro’s The First Fall Classic.
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The Boston Globe has been active on the baseball review front of late. Bill Nowlin, author of several titles on the Red Sox, contributed this piece on Howard Bryant’s bio of Hank Aaron for today’s edition. Yesterday, Bill Littlefield, host of NPR’s Only a Game, considered two baseball titles — Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker […]
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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
May 22, 2010
SFReeper critiques Emma Span’s look at the game from the distaff side and Jason Turbow’s do’s and dont’s. If the British read Moneyball, do they have to convert it into pounds or euros? The AV Club conducted this Q&A with Dan Epstein, author of Big Hair & Plastic Grass. You gotta wonder if he grew […]
Tagged as: baseball books
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