Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Stevens was not a baseball player, manager, coach, front office exec, peanut vendor, or team mascot. Rather, Stevens, who passed away on Dec. 8 at the age of 60, was lawyer. His claim to fame? According to his obituary in The New York Times, his slyly humorous law-review note on the relationship between baseball’s infield […]
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Sal Yvars, the catcher for the New York Giants who spilled the beans about sign stealing during the famous playoff game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951, died Dec. 10 at the age of 84. Richard Goldstein does his usual excellent job in the NY Times‘ obituary. Yvars, the Giants’ back-up receiver from 1957-53 (with […]
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Score, who died Nov. 11 at the age of 75, was the poster boy for “what could have been.” A fireballing left-hander for the Cleveland Indians in the early 1950s, Score endured every pitcher’s nightmare: a head-high line drive back to the box. In this case, the shot came off the bat of the Yankees’ […]
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Former Commissioner Fay Vincent, author of two books of oral baseball history (most recently, We Would Have Played the Game for Nothing), wrote this tribute to fellow oral historian Studs Terkel for the Florida-based TCPalm.com site.
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I was surprised to see this notice in the Publishers Weekly e-mail, until I saw the context: There probably has never been a better baseball book than Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, which was a paean to the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. With Roe’s death there are only a few left, Carl Erskine, […]
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The eulogies keep pouring in about this marvelous writer and raconteur. This one, from Maggie Hendricks of NBC Chicago, specifically speaks to Terkel as a baseball fan. This one from NPR.org isn’t baseball-centric, but he deserves the recognition.
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Studs Terkel died yesterday at the age of 96. He never wrote a baseball book (as far as I’m aware), but Stud Terkel was always a favorite of mine, long before he appeared as sportswriter Huey Fullerton in John Sayle’s Eight Men Out. His acting style might not have been Oscar material, but he contributed […]
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Tresh was one of the last players to bridge the good Yankees to the bad Yankees in the 1960s.
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The inspiration for Bernard Malamud’s epic baseball novel, The Natural, died this date in 1972. His name kept popping up whenever a star-struck fan stalked a celebrity, becoming part of pop culture, surfacing in some very strange places. Like on the TV series Beverly Hills, 90210, according to this episode synopsis from season 10: During […]
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My 40-Year Journey in Pinstripes, by Bobby Murcer with Glen Waggoner (Harper, 2008) Sept. 8 marked Bobby Murcer’s big league debut. That, coupled with his recent passing, makes this an appropriate time to discuss his autobiography. Yankee For Life was a tough one to get through. Not because it was badly written — not at […]
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You can read the entire issue dealing with 9/11 from the SI Vault here.
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What team did he play for, you might ask. But Melendez was the genius behind the Peanuts cartoons. He passed away Sept. 2 at the age of 91.
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Don Gutteridge, the prototypical baseball lifer, died on Sunday at the age of 96. He had been the last surviving member of the St. Louis Cardinals’ “Gas House Gang” of the 1930s. Gutteridge was the manager of the White Sox on one of my earliest baseball cards. Typical skipper-like pose: Standing with one foot on […]
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I was stunned when I read the news that the comedian/actor — he was the star of Mr. 3000 — had died at the age of 50. At the risk of sounding maudlin, the older I get, the more aware I am of those dying around me, especially when they’re younger than I. There are […]
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The son of the legendary Harry Caray died at the age of 68. How sad it must be to go through life know as an extension of someone else, “the wife of,” “the partner of.” Skip was the long-time voice of the Atlanta Braves. The Amazon Report on Skip Caray: Roomies: Tales from the Worlds […]
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From The Canadian Press USA Today MLB.com Chicago Tribune
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Jerome Holtzman, “the dean” of baseball writers, died on July 19 at the age of 82. Holtzman, who wrote for the Chicago-Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune, created the save, which has gone through several incarnations over the years and came under attack as being a “meaningless statistic.” He was a recipient of the 1989 […]
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Sherman “Jocko” Maxwell, a pioneering African-American broadcaster died recently at the age of 100. Maxwell, who was believed to have been the first black sportscaster, contributed to magazines such as Baseball Digest, for which he wrote about Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball. He also wrote Thrills and Spills in Sports, a 1940 book […]
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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 blog 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
* Lest we forget: Mickey Mantle
August 13, 2008
“The Mick” died on Aug. 13, 1995. I happened to be home sick that day, and remember the State-like funeral. Thousands of words have been written on how he came to realize the impact he had on America, how he felt he failed to live up to expectations — both his own and those of […]
Tagged as: Mickey Mantle
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