Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Okay, the Super Bowl is over and the swimsuit issue is out of the way with. Time to get serious. Spring has sprung, the grass has riz I wonder where the ball club is? SI marks the return of Spring Training with a profile of Phillies ace Cole Hamels. SI.com offers this spring training preview, […]
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Beckett offers a very straightforward product. Aside from the team-by-team analysis, the only additional articles deal with the top ten free agent signings (Mark Teixeira leads the list) and ten worst off-season moves, which includes bad trades and poor acquisitions (Nick Swisher’s departure from the White Sox heads this one). There’s also a small 2008 […]
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In a time when the print industry is succumbing to economic turmoils, you wonder if, in lieu of raises, Sports Illustrated isn’t offering to promote its writers’ books as a form of compensation. First it was Tom Verducci with The Yankee Years, excerpted on SI.com. He also used his on-line column to discuss the project. […]
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Judging by the email I’ve received about The Bookshelf, I would guess that many of you are of an age before the Internet made instant gratification an inalienable right. If you wanted “the latest” information on the upcoming baseball season, you got it from from the annual magazines that came out in the early spring, […]
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Or, “here’s another fine mess.” On a recent episode of PTI, Kornheiser and Wilbon were talking about the latest Barry Bonds situation (i.e., a judge saying evidence against him might be disallowed because of improper procedure) and wondering what that might mean for the slugger’s Hall of Fame chances. Of all of his contemporaries — […]
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(Man, I wish I had a named that rhymed cooly with something.) Can’t believe WINS radio led off some of its segments with the “controversy” of the new book. One person interviewed sagely opined that the whole media blitz was just a way to sell more copies, to which the reporter added something along the […]
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And they don’t come much bigger than John Goodman. “Babe Ruth (sic) is one of those things I wish I could go back and do over. It’s like being in that dream where you’re in the subway with no clothes on.” Talking about his portrayal of the Yankee legend in The Babe (1992) in the […]
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Google Books now includes magazines. A quick search for the phrase “baseball” returns almost 1,300 hits, including such sources as Ebony, Jet, Baseball Digest, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics (going all the way back to the early 1900s), and New York Magazine. Presumably more publications will be added. If nothing else, it’s an interesting look to […]
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Tom Verducci’s article on Mike Mussina, future possible, maybe, who knows Hall-of-Famer. Ben Reiter’s piece on heavy hurlers
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I miss Life magazine. None of its descendants match the mix of news and photos and even social impact that the legendary publication enjoyed during its heyday. Now, thanks to Google, you can view some 200 baseball images. It’s a nice mix, but after looking over the available shots, there’s obviously a lot missing. Not […]
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Too bad they can’t get rid of some of those annoying supplements that highlight fashion, furnishings, and vacations that “regular” folks can’t afford instead of doing away with Play, the Times‘ sports supplement. If the sports department is the toy store of a newspaper, I guess we won’t be getting much in the way of […]
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It used to be you had to wait until the following year to read about previous season. But now, thanks to all kinds of new technologies, it’s almost instantaneous. Baseball Insider, a special issue of Sports Weekly, does a great job of recapturing the excitement of the 2008 season while examining the strengths and weaknesses […]
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Ha, made you look.
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It’s no secret that the publishing world is in a lot of trouble. Newspapers across the country have been laying off staff members or offering buyouts in droves (See “Tony Kornheiser” and “Murray Chass,” among others). The MediaMemo blog reports that several magazines are also feeling the pinch, including many under the banner of Time […]
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A Tom Verducci wrap-up on the Phillies’ World Series victory. Big whup.
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Looks like this will be it for baseball for awhile, now that the World Series is over. So enjoy: Dear America, Wish You Were Here Fuel to the Fire (five radical–but inspired–moves that would give the off-season some sizzle.)
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Humbly submitted via the pages of ForeWord Magazine, this non-fiction list of RK’s “essential” baseball reading. I’ll be working on a fiction version soon.
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The baseball post-season takes a back seat to the NBA pre-season as the cover story. Tom Verducci writes the headliner about the Rays in the World Series, while Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus gives the slight nod to Tampa to win in six. Meanwhile, back in Philly…
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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
* 2009 baseball annual analysis
February 27, 2009
Most of the annual previews are available as of this writing. I previously analyzed Beckett’s; here a more comprehensive look at the four I’ve purchased to date. Back in the day, the publisher printed only one cover. Now it’s easy to make one for every team or region. The examples here are for the New […]
Tagged as: Baseball magazines
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