Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
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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It should come as no surprise that the ESPN The Magazine article about Ian Kinsler referred to earlier this week on my other blog, has generated some buzz. In the grand scale of things, it won’t matter, but for now, with a routinely dull spring training under way, with A-Rod out of the picture, the […]
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The 93-year-old Roger Angell, the contemporary “dean of baseball writers,” — at least in my opinion — recently published this bittersweet tale of aging in The New Yorker. Not a lot of baseball at all, but still deserving of your attention.
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Not the fantasy issue, but the real deal. Of course, mine is the New York version, with Derek Jeter and David Wright on the cover, but most of the cover items remain the same.
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There’s always a major thing going on while I’m on vacation that I don’t hear about until I get back. In this case it was the “announcement” that Derek Jeter might enter the publishing world when he retires from his playing career. According to a piece in the Nov. 14 NY Times, “Jeter, the Yankees’ […]
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The list is in for finalists for the 2013 CASEY Award for “Best Baseball Book of the Year,” as designated by Spitball magazine. Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, by Lucas Mann Color Blind: The Forgotten Team that Broke Baseball’s Color Line, by Tom Dunkel Going the Distance, by Michael Joyce Heart of […]
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Brought to you by the folks at Mental Floss, the magazine that gave me my first national exposure and cover story (right). Have these World Series matchups ever happened? (Not to brag but I aced it.) The Baseball Card Brand Quiz (a lot tougher; ugh, I only scored 64%, which was slightly higher than the […]
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Baseball Nation posted this appreciation of “The 10 greatest World Series program covers,” beginning with I’m kind of partial to this one, which came in at No. 4 in Jim Baker’s list:
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Remember when you were a kid and you would go through a stack of your friends’ baseball cards: (Okay, so it’s not baseball cards; work with me here, people.) Fans aren’t the only ones who collect memorabilia. This excellent and somewhat sad story by Richard Sandomir from the Sunday NY Times is a bit different, […]
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In this case I am the Grinch; I am the one who knocks…Ben Reiter’s list on SI.com, written after the Tampa Bay Rays’ Jose Lobaton beat the Boston Red Sox with a walk-off on Monday night. I think you would agree that the most exciting situations are one where there’s no tomorrow, where everything is […]
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The literary magazine is carrying an interesting series — Bull City Summer — which follows the 2013 exploits of the Durham Bulls. Not sure, at a cursory glance, which is the chicken and which is the egg, since Bull City Summer is a stand-alone website: From the “about” page on bullcitysummer.org: 2013 is the 25th […]
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The New York Times ran this marvelous story about the annual Complete Book of Baseball (and lesser sports) edited by Zander Hollander. A nice history lesson. I still have all of these, along with their predecessor, The xxxx Major League Baseball Handbook. These paperbacks sold for, like 50 cents, maybe a buck towards the end […]
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Earlier today the Pittsburgh Pirates placed 36-year-old closer Jason Grilli — recently selected for his first All-Star Game — on the 15-day disabled list with a strain in his right forearm.
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The “ammo” in this case being Mariano Rivera’s fame cutter. New York magazine ran this profile on the NY Yankees retiring closer by Lisa Miller.
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I was waiting for this: now you can access facsimile of many older issue issues of SI via the publication’s “vault.” All you have to do is select the issue and click on the “view this issue” link. Then you can “turn” virtual pages. Sure beat the old way SI Vauly handled things, with just […]
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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
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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