Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Last month, Baseball Nation posted this entry about baseball-themed movie posters, even if the movies weren’t about the game itself, which led to some semantic reservations by yours truly. This time they come out and say that these are “The top 10 baseball scenes (in non-baseball movies)” The piece, by Jim Baker, is especially timely […]
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A Worldwide Dictionary, 1869-2011, by Richard Worth. McFarland, 2013. 416 pages, $55. What’s in a name? More than you’d think, according to this entertaining reference. In some 400 pages, Worth lists every name of every professional franchise — including Negro and foreign leagues — according to city/town, from Abbeville, Alabama, to Zion, Utah, totaling more […]
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Author and Sports Nation guy Rob Neyer posted this piece based on Dan Epstein’s Esquire piece, “The 20 Best Baseball Books Ever,” which Neyer posted mere hours before mine appeared. A lot of comments I’ve read around the Interweb deal mainly with the order of the ranking as well mas omitted favorites. Great minds and […]
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See what I did there? I combined Dan Epstein, author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s, with the publication to which he contributed this article on “The 20 Best Baseball Books Ever,” his choice for the top 20 non-fiction titles in the genre to […]
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Nuckolball posted a review of Robert Creamer’s classic bio, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. These are kind of like mini-reviews, so I’m including Baseball Nation’s piece on “Your favorite baseball books,” which includes, among others, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball […]
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The best way to play catch-up is via a “Bits and Pieces” entry so here goes: James Bailey offers this appreciation for W.P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Rob Neyer, Grant Brisbee, and Murray Chass on Mike Piazza and his new book, Long Shot. Don’t know where this excellent Simpsons/Moneyball mashup came from, but Brisbee […]
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Literary birthday greetings: Poor Feb. 1. It has a tough act act to follow with Jan. 31, which celebrates the arrival of such legends Jackie Robinson, Ernie Banks, and Nolan Ryan, who, between the three of them, have been the subjects of scores of books. Turns out there are no players who were born on […]
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Look, there are only so many flicks that could possibly fall into this category, so it’s just a matter of how they’re ranked. This list comes from The Hollywood Reporter, so they should know. No real surprises here. Damn Yankees leads off, followed by Bang The Drum Slowly, The (original) Bad News Bears, The Natural, […]
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(To borrow The New York Times‘ motto) Marty Appel recently revised his helpful list of baseball titles that have appeared on the Times‘ best-seller list. The article appears on the Sports Collectors Digest website. As Appel, a former PR director for the New York Yankees, notes there are several familiar books that are conspicuous in […]
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I don’t know about you, but being the curmudgeon that I am, I have trouble with the folks who jump on the baseball bandwagon once the regular season is over. This ain’t the NBA or NHL, bud, where everyone gets into the playoffs so you don’t have to pay attention until there are just a […]
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♦ From the Tulsa World, this on on Robert Fitts’ Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan. Upshot: “It is very well-researched and a balanced account, but it occasionally threatens to sag under the weight of such details. Readers need not be fans of baseball to appreciate the sport […]
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♦ Bill Jordan posted this review of Paul Dickson’s Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, on Baseball Reflections. Upshot: “Anyone who considers themselves to be a fan of baseball history should pick this work up. Whether you were familiar with Veeck or not before reading the book, you stand to learn a lot about this interesting […]
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♦ The Knoxville News published this review of native son R.A. Dickley’s Wherever I Wind Up. Upshot: “t is rare to find a baseball book by an insider that dishes no dirt. It is even rarer to find a professional athlete willing to acknowledge his own mistakes. In “Wherever I Wind Up,” R.A. Dickey reveals […]
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For April 29 (yes, April 29, according to the website) Imperfect: An Improbable Life, by Jim Abbot and Tim Brown stands at #16. Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift, by Harvey Araton is at #20. Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball, by R.A. […]
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♦ Tom Hoffarth’s latest two entries on his 30/30 feature: The Team That Forever Changed Baseball and America: The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, by The Society of American Baseball Research, edited by Lyle Spatz, Maurice Bouchard and Leonard Levin, and Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball, by Chris Lamb. Upshots: Dodgers […]
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In honor of opening week, The New York Times posted this piece in its Arts Beat blog in which several of their writers and editors pick their favorite baseball titles. Among them: George Vecsey, The Southpaw and The Boys of Summer Michiko Kakutani, Chief Book Critic, Underworld Tyler Kepner, Ball Four and Men at Work […]
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This list appeared on a SABR post and it seemed like a good resource, so I’m recreating it (sans links) here, FYI: Bloom, John, A House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture (Univ. of Minn. Press, 1997) Boyd, Brendan and Harris, Fred, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum 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 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
August 30, 2012
Time for the occasional declutter of the accumulated links and stories, so here goes. “Dan Barry’s Bottom of the 33rd has won the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, which honors a nonfiction book on the subject of sports.” More here. From the Yogi Berra Museum: Former Yankee star second baseman Bobby Richardson, a cornerstone […]
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