Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
It’s quite appropriate that baseball’s winter meetings are held around the holidays. If your team’s front office guys are good, you can get a swell present of a 40-home run slugger or Cy Young-caliber pitcher. Or you can get a lump of coal. It’s way too early to report on anything major, so in the […]
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“…Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books.” Look for other publishers to follow suit. And we all know where baseball/sports books fall on the foot chain.
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Too bad they can’t get rid of some of those annoying supplements that highlight fashion, furnishings, and vacations that “regular” folks can’t afford instead of doing away with Play, the Times‘ sports supplement. If the sports department is the toy store of a newspaper, I guess we won’t be getting much in the way of […]
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Cubs’ skipper Lou Pienlla and Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon were named managers of the year for 2008. Pinella published Sweet Lou, written with Maury Allen in 1986. He’s got a new one coming out next year from St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne. So can it be long before Maddon has one, too? Managers whose teams […]
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It’s no secret that the publishing world is in a lot of trouble. Newspapers across the country have been laying off staff members or offering buyouts in droves (See “Tony Kornheiser” and “Murray Chass,” among others). The MediaMemo blog reports that several magazines are also feeling the pinch, including many under the banner of Time […]
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from the Urbana, IL, News-Gazette.
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One more reason that the current NY Times is not your granddaddy’s newspaper. The history of the World Series home run on TV (video).
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A lot of fans proably forget that the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is also a library. I spent a great week up there several years ago, doing research for a book about baseball during the Korean War years. the staff couldn’t have been nicer, and the access of walking around like I belonged was […]
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I’ve written about this before, but The Wall Street Journal ran another story about kids ‘n cards from generations past. The little fools without the foresight to see how much money was to be made from keeping those baseball cards in pristine condition. Sorry, kid, you’ll have to go to a commuter college, Daddy din’t […]
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The Chicago Sun-Times posted this extensive article on the Louisville Slugger Museum in, well, Louisville And when you go, bring me back a souvenir.
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ESPN offers this interesting insight for The Magazine‘s baseball editors on their thoughts for feature stories that ran during 2008. Among the top items: The Preview Issues, fantasy and “real life” Profiles on Greg Maddux, Elijah Dukes, Eric Bedard, Brandon Webb, Joel Zumaya, Dustin Pedroia, and Francisco Rodriguez Chicago baseball The Tampa Bay Rays Rating […]
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Bibliography Committee Newsletter, September 2008 Features Skip McAfee’s review of The Only Game in Town: Baseball Stars of the 1930s and 1940s Talk About the Game They Loved Leverett T. Smith’s review of The Curt Flood Story: The Man Behind the Myth An interview with Sarah Freligh, author of Sort of Gone A profile of […]
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According to this piece from the Publisher’s Weekly daily e-mail, the house is going through some major changes. At the risk of sounding elitist, Sports Publishing has always struck me as a common man’s McFarland. While the latter is a home for academic treatises of the most eclectic topics, the former producing titles that one […]
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Sorry, a little late on this one. Holiday, and all. *** General: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis Yankee Stadium, the Official Retrospective, by Al Santasiere Watching Baseball Smarter, by Zack Hample. The Natural, by Bernard Malamud The Mental Game of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance, by H.A. Dorfman […]
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According to a press release from Major League Baseball, limited replay review begins Aug. 28 in three series: Minnesota at Oakland, Texas at Los Angeles and Phillies at Chicago. The rest of the teams will begin on Friday. The statement announces that Instant replay will apply only to home run calls — whether they are […]
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Before the advent of the wonderful Sports Illustrated “Vault” archives, the magazine’s only presence had a little more pizzazz than it seems to these days. Maybe the company doesn’t want to devote time or resources to making two versions, so they’re just doing a “vault-like”, no frills version: no pictures, just plain (unattractive fonts). Case […]
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Buzz Bissinger is no fan of blogs. So by extension, he might not have much empathy for will Leitch and Deadspin. Here’s a snippet of Bissinger vs. Leitch on an episode of Bob Costas’ HBO program: (The whole piece can be seen on the Deadspin site.) Surprisingly, Bissinger granted an interview with his adversary, as […]
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From Editor and Publisher‘s Web site: “Study: Newspaper Sports Departments Mostly Male, White“ Newspaper sports departments remain nearly all white and male — and progress towards diversity is painfully slow, concludes a “report card” on sports staffing released Thursday at the annual meeting of Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE). I’ll post a link to the […]
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This interesting piece from InsideHighered.com on how Bull Durham serves as a metaphor for the academic world. My classes have come to a close for another year while professional baseball is finding its summer stride. I have come to see that my classes over the span of a semester are a lot like a baseball […]
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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
* Another book on baseball history
November 12, 2008
This one by Mark Cressnan in The A to Z History of Baseball. At the risk of being totally unfair, I wonder about such books, self-published and without much pomp and circumstance. For the brief press release to state “Cressman, who possesses a Master’s Degree in Sport Administration, is an authority on the subject matter […]
Tagged as: baseball history
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