Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine announced the winner of the 2014 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year is Kostya Kennedy for Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. The showing turned in by Rose was especially impressive given the outstanding field of finalists, which was extended by two books over the normal total of […]
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By Douglas B. Lyons. The Lyons Press. 216 Pages. $24.95 To be fair, how do you write a book about a book that’s essentially about tables of numbers? That’s the challenge Lyons picks up in 100 Years of Who’s Who in Baseball. While it’s fun to look at each of the covers, dating back to […]
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The pepperpot player and manager died today at the age of 92. I’m guessing this was expected, considering how quickly his obituary appeared on Robinson Funeral Home site. Dark had a 14-year career in the Majors, beginning with the Boston Braves in 1946. After a two-year stint in the military, he returned to the Braves, […]
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Note: Just like Chuck Lorre’s “vanity cards” at the end of The Big Bang Theory, you should read these list stories to their conclusion; the end is always changing, even though the theme is basically the same, finishing up with a self-promotional message. On with the show… Here are the top ten baseball books as […]
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Note: Just like Chuck Lorre’s “vanity cards” at the end of The Big Bang Theory, you should read these list stories to their conclusion; the end is always changing, even though the theme is basically the same, finishing up with a self-promotional message. On with the show… Here are the top ten baseball books as […]
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My old friend Steven Rosch posted a link to an SI article about the next big thing in baseball equipment on my Facebook timeline. I know you have to move along with the times, but this, this is an abomination. I understand not all gloves are made of leather; you frequently read about poor kids […]
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That’s my advice to any athlete approached by Sports Illustrated for a cover story. Mo’ne Davis, the 13-year-old pitcher for the Mid-Atlantic/ Philadelphia entry at the Little League World Series, has been all the buzz lately, thanks to her dazzling success and poise. Well, that streak ran out last night as her team was defeated […]
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More articles have come out lately in praise of Roger Angell, who received the Spink Award for baseball writing last weekend at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Tom Verducci, senior baseball writer for Sports Illustrated had this to say. Is Verducci the “heir apparent” for Angell? Remember, Angell has been writing about the game since […]
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Not to mention redesign the score books. You hear a number of sports pundits clamoring about throwing out the records of those who have used performance enhancing drugs. But really, everyone knows how impractical that would be. What would become of the record books? Since baseball is a zero sum game, if you take away […]
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If you’ve been a reader of this blog for awhile you know I’m all about the process. I love back-story and deconstruction. I want to know, like any reader, how authors come up with ideas, who their inspirations were. So it was with a sense of serendipity that I came across this yesterday at my […]
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Here’s something you don’t see every day. I’m guessing you could count on one hand the number of times Women’s Wear Daily has run feature pieces on baseball (items referring to baseball caps as accessories do not count). But here’s a major profile on the venerated writer Roger Angell. Didn’t realize he was a fashion […]
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Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine announced yesterday that it has purchased Minor Trips, a newsletter devoted to minor league baseball, now in its 24th year of publication. Minor Trips will continue to be published in the same format and under the same title as before, with founder and former publisher Bob Carson remaining involved as […]
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Looking over the overlooked in baseball book news: Tidewater Tides manager Ron Johnson gets a nice profile based on his inclusion in John Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name, by John Feinstein. Speaking of which, the Roanoke Times posted this review of the book. Speaking of reviews, Philly.com posted this one on Jackie and Campy, […]
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Welcome back, boys and girls. It’s time for that annual exercise in which we compare the Big Two: Sports Illustrated vs. ESPN the Magazine to see how the baseball previews compare. On the one hand, it can’t be too easy to keep coming up with new ideas for the issue. You profile the new hot […]
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Brad Mangin, who published a collection of his Baseball Instagrams last year, has a new slideshow of some of his 2014 spring training work on the Sports Illustrated site. Here’s my conversation with Mangin, conducted last September, about his somewhat unorthodox approach.
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I’ll be writing a deeper compare/contrast entry about the baseball previews for Sports Illustrated vs. ESPN The Magazine when the former comes out (received the latter earlier this week), but in the meantime… The ESPN publication produces a podcast in which an editor and writer chat a story in a given edition. In the current […]
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Herschel Cobb (right) accepts the Casey Award, presented annually by Spitball magazine for the best baseball book of the year. Cobb is the author of Heart of a Tiger: Growing Up With My Grandfather, Ty Cobb. Presenting the award at the March 9 banquet in Cincinnati is Mike Shannon, editor of Spitball. Also in attendance […]
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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
More fun opening day items
April 2, 2014
Nate Silver recently began his 538.com site under the aegis of ESPN. One would hope that he and his minions will produce a lot of smart sports (i.e., baseball) stuff. Obviously a site dedicated to projections and predictions has a lot of math to it. Ugh.But you have to take the “bad” with the good. […]
Tagged as: 538.com, baseball predictions, baseball statistics, Joe Posnanski, Jonah Keri, Kansas City Royals, Mets, Nate Silver
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