Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Bill James Handbook 2020 (Acta Sports 2019) Like the game itself, James has come a long way since his Abstracts of the late seventies and early eighties. He has grown into the guru of analytics. He has changed the way we look at the game, not just relying on “baseball card stats.” But can you […]
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Headnote: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one […]
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Wow, has it really been more than a month since the last one of these? Yikes. As you may have notice, these entries have been falling off in the last several weeks. My apologies. A new full-time job — very different from what I had been doing as the sports and features editor of a […]
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As you may have notice, these entries have been falling off in the last several weeks. My apologies. A new full-time job — very different from what I had been doing as the sports and features editor of a weekly community newspaper in suburban New Jersey — has put new and strange demands on my […]
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Just finished thumbing through A History of Baseball in 100 Objects, the latest baseball release by Josh Leventhal, author of several other well-produced baseball titles. The objects included herein represent the game since before its “formal” recognized inception in the mid 1800s (and please don’t write about the exact DOB of the game). But the […]
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One of the things I missed most about not blogging here regularly was the opportunity to conduct these podcast interviews. There’s always someone interesting to talk with a bout their new project, be it a book, a move, a musical album, etc. I spoke with Joe Siegman as a major player in the U.S. Maccabi […]
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A Fan’s Notes from Left Field, by Josh Ostergaard. Coffee House Press, 2014. (Not to be confused with Confessions from Left Field: A Baseball Pilgrimage, published by Raymond Mungo in 1983.) To be honest, I did not have high expectations for this one after reading the review in the NY Times‘ Sunday book supplement a […]
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Would if I could upon learning that Jonah (The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First) Keri is working on the “definitive” history of the team. Although I was not born there, my maternal side hails from that city and I have fond memories of family […]
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The Yankee Hater Memoirs, 1953-2005, by Gene Hutmaker and (with some reluctance) Michael A. Hutmaker, VirtualBookWorm, 2006. Not every author has the luxury — or even necessity — of working with a large publishing company. More and more these days, writers are going solo, finding alternate ways of getting their work to the public. Gene […]
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Conversations with 17 Former Jewish Major League Baseball players, by Dave Cohen. Havenhurst Books, 2010. Hot on the heels, but apparently unconnected with the new documentary Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story, we have this new oral history collection conducted by Cohen, described on the publisher’s website as “the familiar radio voice of Georgia […]
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Baseball Stuff You Never Needed to Know and Can Certainly Live Without, by Robert Schnakenberg. Triumph, 2010. Schnakenberg takes his love for pop culture (anti-culture?) and puts a national pastime spin on it in this little faux-reference volume. The connection between PC and baseball has been handled in more serious veins by Jonathan Fraser Light […]
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And Other Tales from the Edge of Baseball Fandom, by Emma Span (Villard, 2010) As much as I love baseball, there are times when I take a step back and wonder, “What am I doing with this nonsense? Surely, there are better ways to spend my time and energies.” And at the risk of being […]
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by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder (2003; Picador Translation 2009) I can’t even remember where I heard of this title but I’m glad I did. Ogawa tells a touching story about a Japanese housekeeper, her 10-year-old son, and her professional charge, a former mathematics professor with an unusual disability, which was the result of […]
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There are a couple of books out this year that deal with athletes — Roger Maris and Hank Aaron– who were vilified by the press and the public for the audacity in approaching the home run numbers put up by Hall of Famer Babe Ruth, albeit for different reasons. Maris, who broke the single season […]
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Several major outlets, including ESPN and Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch are running major announcements that Mark McGwire admits having used steroids “on occasion throughout the 1990’s,” including his record-breaking 1998 season. Surprisingly, the Post-Dispatch is using the Associated Press story rather than their own reporters. But it is […]
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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
Rooting for clothes?
April 23, 2026 · 0 comments
Why do fans root for a specific team? Is it a generational thing? “My grandfather and father were Yankee fans, so that’s who I root for.” “My dad was a Yankees fan, so I root for the Mets, just to piss him off.” So if a team decides to change its look, would that make […]
Tagged as: Uniforms
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