Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Mark Harris, author of Bang the Drum Slowly and other seminal works of adult baseball fiction, passed away a year ago due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 84. His 1956 novel about the relationship between star pitcher Henry “Author” Wiggen (think Tom Seaver combined with Jim Bouton) and his doomed catcher, […]
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The former general manager for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers passed away May 1 at the age of 93. According to Richard Goldstein’s obituary in The New York Times: In his 18 years with the Dodgers, from 1951 to 1968, Bavasi’s clubs won eight National League pennants and four World Series championships, including the […]
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The man who held the NL consecutive hitting streak until Pete Rose broke it in 1978, Holmes struck out 122 times in 4,992 at-bats during his 11-year career, spent mostly with the Boston Braves. Look at that number again. Some players strike out that much in a season. Holmes spent 30 years working in the […]
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The actor, who died Monday at the age of 93, never appeared in any baseball films, but his daughter, Ann, was married to Sandy Koufax from 1969-92. So I guess that gives me a “degrees of separation” scenario with Widmark, since I met Koufax many years ago at a business function. You can tell by […]
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One of the great sportswriters passed away Feb. 27 at the age of 93. Among his other works was a little book, written under the pseudonym of “Richard Hooker” (and with a collaborator), that would later become a wildly popular TV show about the Korean War. You might remember it as M*A*S*H. From his obituary […]
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The former general manager of the Cincinnati Reds of the Big Red Machine era, died at the age of 89. Howsam was also GM for the St. Louis Cardinals, from 1964-66, right before the team won back-to-back pennants.
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I first really started getting into baseball in 1966; my first live game was aday camp trip where the Mets played the San Francisco Giants. Still have the scroecard in the attic. Don Cardwell was one of those “old”players. Regardless of his age — and he was only 31-34 during his years with the Mets […]
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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
