Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
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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A fair share of the recent Cooperstown Baseball Symposium considered myriad aspects of Casey at the Bat, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this month. The esteemed sportswriter Frank Deford was the keynote speaker for the event. Deford contributed a speculative article, “Huge Commotion in Mudville” to the July 18, 1988 issue of Sports Illustrated. Shortly […]
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One of my favorite baseball preseason pastimes is reading all the predictions from the “experts.” I would pore over the annual publications, the newspapers (when they used to publish a special section right before Opening Day, and the various websites and create elaborate spreadsheets. That way, I could test the accuracy of their prognostications at […]
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Congratulations to the Houston Astros, now proudly atop the AL West. Shows what all the baseball pundits know. That’s what the preview issues are all about: picking who will finish where, which team will win it all, who will be the big award winners come the end of the season. The two primary publications, to […]
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The previous article from The New Republic had a link to another baseball story in the magazine: the possible flaws in MLB’s partnership with T-Mobile to supply teams with cell phones for communicate with the bullpen.
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Kent Russel contributed this lengthy piece about the Amish affinity for the national pastime in The New Republic. What better group to emulate the original game, before TV and artificial grass. Given their proclivity for privacy, I wonder if the kids in the photos are actually Amish, or just models dressed that way.
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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
Context is all: Ian Kinsler and ESPN The Magazine
March 7, 2014
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 […]
Tagged as: Alex Rodriguez, Detroit Tigers, ESPN the Magazine, Ian Kinsler, Texas Rangers
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