Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Cover story on Tim “The Freak” Lincecum. Other baseball stories include: Tom Verduci’s mid-season report The latest MLB players’ poll: Who has the best raw power?
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Last week the SI MLB player poll asked about the most overrated athlete. This week, it’s the most underrated. Rays’ DH Cliff Floyd opens up a bit about his new team. Michael Farber profiles Marlin’s slugger Dan Uggla. Whither C.C. Sabathia? Yankees or not Yankees? Maybe I’m getting old, but I remember when playing Milton […]
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Tiger’s on the cover, but there are several baseball items, including: The SI “Most Overrated Player” Poll “Shake Me Down at the Ball Game“, by Josh Levin A mini-profile on A’s closer Huston Street How the Red Sox are faring with key players injured
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The Inside Baseball story profiles Chipper Jones, who’s making a bid to be the first .400 hitter since George Brett.
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The former Sports Illustrated columnist is the latest to defect to ESPN The Magazine. In his Market Watch media column, Jon Friedman express concern that Reilly will fall victim to the ESPN mindset and become a “yeller.” My worry is that ESPN will gradually turn Reilly into One of Them, the preeners who loom so […]
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Like the nerdy math genius at school who figures out a way to make a few bucks by crunching the numbers for sports betting, this piece from Scientific American warns about putting money down on a team that travels across the country. The results of the three-hour time difference can throw off the athletes’ circadian […]
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TSN used to be called “the Bible of baseball.” As a youth used to spend my 50 cents of allowance for the tabloid paper which contained storied, capsule recaps and box scores, and tons of stats in a pre-Bill James era. There have been several major shifts over the years. For one thing, the decision […]
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Lots of baseball in today’s Times. In the Play supplement, a slide show offers tips from stars like George Brett on how hitters keep their weight back, identify pitches, hit the other way, go for the long ball (which chicks dig), adjust to right- and left-handed pitchers, adjust to the count, and prepare their swing […]
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The cover story (by Albert Chen) is the improbable tale of Josh Hamilton, now with the Texas Rangers. It wasn’t enough that he came back from the brink of oblivion; now he’s excelling in a way that wasn’t even predicted when he was originally drafted. So many low points to choose from. No, it wasn’t […]
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Pat Jordan, who wrote about the difficulties of trying to interview Jose Canseco on Deadspin.com, does it again for Slate.com, this time with Josh Beckett, who declined the honor of a New York Times’ profile. This has become the curse of modern sports journalism. Writers and fans alike no longer get to know the object […]
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Funny how the editor of Deadspin.com has such disdain against traditional journalism except when he seems to benefit from it. Case in point, his article on the Chicago Cubs in the New York Times‘ “Play” supplement. On the other hand, is the newspaper just as “guilty” of providing the forum? I’m just askin’…
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The cover story by Tom Verducci features the crazy way the season is shaping up so far. Up is down and down is up as the Rays and Marlins — aong other surprise franchises — are reading their divisions. A second feature profiles the Indians’ pitcher Cliff Lee.
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[This piece appears in the May/June issue of ForeWord Magazine.] Baseball books: Class is in session The notion that baseball is a metaphor for life has been around since man first took bat to ball. In reality, it’s more appropriate to say that the national pastime is a metaphor for education; academic disciplines that baseball […]
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My daughter — my high school freshman age daughter — started receiving Hooah!, a quarterly publication produced for the National Guard. This leads to a couple of question, the first of which is how did they get her name on a mailing list. I’m 99.9% sure she didn’t request it, meaning they had to get […]
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(May 19): Feature story on Elijah Dukes, the Washington Nationals’ “troubled” star Column by Tim Keown on the latest in the continuing soap opera that is Roger Clemens 8 Things to Know About Groundskeepers And the usual from MLB Insider (May 12): Ben Reiter profile of Max Scherzer, rookie pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks (May […]
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I culled this entry from an article on Sportingnews.com about “The Biggest Liars in Sports History”: 9. JOE MORGAN Joe’s Truth: ESPN’s top baseball talking head gave us some baseball history when he beat Philadelphia with a RBI single in his 1964 Major League Baseball debut. His hit (he told us) extended the Colt 45’s […]
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Awhile back it was announced that Lenny Dylstra was working on a lifestyle magazine aimed at former professional athletes which would also purportedly help them manage their finances. Not so fast. According to this piece in the New York Post, there’s trouble a-brewing’.
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Two baseball related items in the May 2 issue of The Week: The Book List has mini-capsule reviews of four titles including But Didn’t We Have Fun?, The Greatest Game; We Would Have Played for Nothing; and The Code. In “The last word” section, “The truth about baseball’s roots” is excerpted from Kevin Baker’s “At […]
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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
* Life imitates art
June 20, 2008
In the current issue of ESPN The Magazine, Rick Reilly writes about a high school pitcher who deliberately threw at a home plate umpire, instructing his catcher to let the ball go on through. You can read that piece here. The scenario is eerily reminiscent of a scene from Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel […]
Tagged as: baseball fiction, Philip Roth, Rick Reilly, The Great American Novel
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