Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Last week I posted about the March issues of the old Baseball Digest which offered “scouting reports” on promising rookies. This week, it’s the American League’s turn. Don Baylor, Orioles, outfield: “Everything to make him big leaguer in two years.” Pretty accurate: it took him that long to play in more than nine ML games. […]
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Back when it actually was a “digest,” the then- monthly publication devoted its March issue to up-and-coming players. The March 1970 offering touted “Scouting Reports on…Rookies from the Confidential Files of Major League Clubs,” which I’m guessing was hyperbolic. Each “capsule” included the player’s DOB, height, weight, throwing and batting sides, a few minor league […]
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Remind magazine is for “people of a certain age,” of which, for better or worse, I am now a member. Each issue is based on a theme but seems to devote itself primarily to TV shows from a specific period. (There was even a baseball issue published in May 2024, which led to my subscribing […]
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Lately I’ve been collecting the baseball preview issues of Sports Illustrated. As you can imagine, some are more expensive than others. I have an upper limit on how much I’ll spend but I’ve been happy with the results. The latest arrivals include 1957, 1958, 1965, 1968, and 1970. Aside from the wonderful writing and the […]
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It looks like Tigers ace Tarik Skubal will be out for a significant portion of the season. This kind of renders the pre-season prognostications moot and is especially true when considering print publications. Skubal, along with the Pirates’ Paul Skenes, was the subject of a feature article in Athlon (“Pair of Aces: Tarik […]
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Baseball preview issues. I really don’t know who the audience for these paper dinosaurs is anymore. As a pre-Internet kid, I looked forward to that period in early spring when they hit the news stands en masse. Some were Some were just “one-year wonders.” Others, like Sport, The Sporting News, Street & Smith, Inside Sports, […]
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From November 26, 2007. I miss Sports Illustrated. But then, I miss a lot of print publications, including the one I used to work for from 2004-2016. After more than 20 years working for a religious non-profit organization, I was unceremoniously downsized. It took almost two years but after doing some freelance work for the […]
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When I was about 10 years old, I got into a heap of trouble because I spent some of the change from an errand on a copy of The Sporting News and Baseball Digest. Total cost: $1. In retrospect, I understand the difficult financial situation my family was in at the time, but at that age, I […]
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While looking for Robert Benson’s The Game for last week’s BBS post, I found my collection of baseball annuals, specifically Street and Smith’s Official Baseball Yearbook for 1975. What a treat. The articles included profiles of Frank Robinson and designated hitters; Lou Brock’s 118 stolen bases and the impact that had on other thieves in […]
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What is this world coming to? It was bad enough when Sports Illustrated laid off many of the staff that made the magazine “illustrated” to begin with. I was bad enough when it went from a weekly to a bi-weekly to a monthly to just online. But now? “Sports Illustrated lays off most of its […]
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More and more, it seems the players I grew up admiring as a teenager are shuffling off this mortal coil. This includes Hall of Famers, Greats, Near-Greats, and ordinary lunch bucket guys. The latest from that “generation” is Vida Blue, who passed away Saturday at the age of 73. Here’s his obituary by Alex Traub […]
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When it comes to baseball. Of course, much of that was due to Roger Angell‘s excellent essays. Yes, there have been other contributors, but none with the gravitas or tenure of Angell. There have been plenty of covers and cartoons about the national pastime. Many, of the former, including the cover of the current issue, […]
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Every year since I was a little shaver, I looked forward to the period from February to April when the annual baseball magazines would come out. At one point, it was basically Smith and Street, but over the years others would crop up. Some would last, others would not. Among the baseball preview issues in […]
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Used to be around this time of year you could look forward to the baseball annuals from Street & Smith, Athlon, Lindy’s, and a host of other magazine publishers. Of course, back in the day there were many others put out by the likes of The Sporting News, Major League Baseball, Bill Mazeroski, with Baseball […]
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Because of MLB’s recent labor problems , I really didn’t expect to see the regular baseball annuals come out at the usual time — late January, early February. I was at my local CVS and while waiting for prescriptions, I found the new Lindy’s 2022 Preview issue. The website said these were available Feb. 23 […]
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The August 23 edition of The New Yorker features an interesting/disheartening article by Zach Helfand on the imminent (?) arrival of automated umpiring systems to call balls and strikes. A telling quote from the story: According to Sword, A.B.S. was part of a larger project to make baseball more exciting. Executives are terrified of losing […]
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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
The end of an era?
April 4, 2023
My copy of Lindy’s Sports Baseball 2023 Preview arrived in the mail yesterday. This is what it has come to. I couldn’t find it at any of my usual outlets: CVS, the local newsstand, or even Barnes and Noble, so I had to order it online. It may be the last such publication I buy. […]
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