Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Who better than Roger Angell, the New Yorker’s veteran baseball analyst, to opine on the strange conclusion of the 2007 season, one which saw the epic collapse by the Mets to lose their hold on first place in the NL East, three three-and-out divisional playoffs, and the dismissal/ resignation of Joe Torre, who had enjoyed […]
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This week features the NBA preview, which sets an All-Star precedent by listing the sport’s luminaries in height order. The lone baseball feature is “The Possible Dream,” a World Series preview by Tom Verducci, with a sidebar from Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus. Two other items on baseball: Whither the Yankees now that Joe Torre […]
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Playoffs are still the baseball topic in SI but they don’t rate the top story, which goes to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots (followed by a midseason college football piece). Tom Verducci penned “Something in the Air,” about the potential ALCS win by the Indians over the Red Sox (which may have actually […]
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The March 30, 1925 issue of Time magazine featured the first occasion in which baseball was treated as a cover feature. The article regarded the rookie season of future Hall of Famer George Sisler. It’s always interesting to see how language — especially written — was treated in past generations. Before television, and even before […]
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“Two Cleveland die-hards, Scott Raab and Jay Levin, blog the baseball playoffs until a champion is crowned.” The running running is reminiscent of King and Onan in Faithful which consisted primarily of back-and-forth e-mails between the two writers on the 2004 Red Sox season. How fortunate for them that the Sox chose that year to […]
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Most on-line editions of print magazines have a search component. Some offer full-text versions of their articles, while others (the mean ones) only post abstracts, requiring the curious to either pay for a subscription (either full or “web-only”) or the individual item. I’ve done some preliminary research and will be posting the results from time […]
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As the days dwindle down to a precious for for Baseball 2007, SI headlines with the LCS. Michael Wilbon noted on Pardon the Interruption that it might be hard to get behind the NCLS since the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks teams have been around only a relatively short time. It’s not like the cubs, […]
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“Playoff Phever” cries the cover of this week’s issue, which pheatures a photo of shortstop Jimmy Rollins, who boldly predicted at the beginning of the season, when the pundits were handing the Mets the Eastern Division Crown, that his team would be in the thick of the race. Of course, thick turned to thin against […]
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The epic collapse of the New York Mets in the last two-plus weeks of the season will no doubt be deconstructed by writers in weeks and months to come. After all, Jeff Pearlman took an unflinching look at the underachieving team of 1992 in The Worst Team Money Could Buy and in many cases, 2007 […]
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Finally, baseball is the cover story as the teams head into the final week of the season. Red Sox reliever Johnathan Papelbon is the cover boy and the lead in Tom Verducii’s “Late and Great.” “Summer’s over, but the heat’s being turned up on some of the game’s biggest stars as they take the October […]
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The feature story this week is “A Death in the Baseball Family,” which follows the tragic story of Mike Coolbaugh, the first base coach for the AA Tulsa Drillers who was killed by a line drive foul ball. But it’s not only about Coolbaugh, who left behind a pregnant wife and two small sons, but […]
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Cover story: Football again. Baseball coverage: Alex Rodriguez is included in “As Good as It Gets,” by Phil Taylor. Along with Roger Federer and Tiger Woods, A-Rod is celebrated for his accomplishment of hitting seven home runs in five games. “For the Record” takes a look at “The Unnatural,” a.k.a Rick Ankiel. The former pitcher […]
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With football season starting, baseball will lose its dominance on the pages of SI. This week’s items include: Photos of Jay Buchholz’s no-hitter over the Orioles “Hitting fastballs with…Chipper Jones Back to School memories with several big leaguers including Shawn Green, Adam Dunn, and Russell Martin (no really big stars here) A chart of potential […]
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From Smithsonian.com, this piece by Ian Herbert which speculates on the identity of the first Hispanic player. “…why all the mystery surrounding someone who appears to have had little to no impact on the game of baseball? The answer lies in the most basic of details: Castro’s birthplace.” Until 2001, Castro was listed in the […]
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From Atlantic Monthly, May 1987, an amusing collection of highlights by Robert Atwan featuring famous writers as players, including “Ernie” Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Tommy Wolfe, “Lucky” Sam Beckett, Henry Miller, and Frank Kafka, among others. In the second game of a double-header in Detroit in 1919, the Boston first base coach began pointing his […]
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The big theme this week is the NFL preview, but there are a handful of baseball items, including: A Q&A with Brewers’ rookie sensation Ryan Braun The SI MLB Poll: Who was your favorite player when you were a kid? Low scores here: 10 percent picked Nolan Ryan; 6 percent chose Junior Griffey, Call Ripken, […]
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An SI “player update” notes Bobby Cox as he broke John McGraw’s record for most ejections as a manager, getting the boot for the 132nd time in a win over the Giants on Aug. 14. Tom Verducci profiles the Red Sox’s David Ortiz resurgence and its implications for his team (“Blasts from the Past”). And […]
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Charges of “ism” — racism, sexism, agism, etc. — always make for hot topics and the media loves to jump on any information, sometimes a bit too quickly, or without fully understanding the material/source/etc. Case in point: In the Aug. 13 edition of Time magazine, Katie Rooney asks the button-pushing question “Are Baseball Umpires Racist?” […]
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The Aug. 13-19 issue of Sports Business Journal carried this interview with Drayton McLane, chairman and CEO of the Houston Astros, One of the questions asked and asnwered: SBJ: The game’s key business metrics, such as attendance, TV ratings and overall revenue, are all up this season, as we expected, but is there a ceiling […]
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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
Baseball and instant replay: Is it about time?
October 23, 2007
In an op-ed piece in Street & Smith’s SportsBusiness Journal of Oct. 22-28, Eldon L. Ham, an adjunct professor of sports law and society at Chicago-Kent College of Law, argues persuasively about “An indisputable need for replay.” Replay opponents steadfastly argue that baseball is a 162-game marathon, not a sprint, and therefore all its imperfections […]
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