Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Forget the first robin; this is my measuring stick. I’m savoring this. Every year I promise to study these annuals, to really get a better grip on who’s who and what’s what. This time I mean it. One of the first things I look at every year is the list of milestones, a holdover from […]
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Taking a page from his own book, Rob Neyer “challenges” some assertions by Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx from an article in a 1962 issue of Baseball Monthly. Note the title: BaseballFactCheck.org. No such site exists, but it should. Neyer could recruit some baseball scholars to bust myths. Just sayin’.
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This goes back aways, but David Roth wrote about R.A. Dickey, mold-breaker for the concept of the cliched athlete, in the July 9 issue of New Yorker. More recently, Will Leitch offers these thoughts about the Mets in a “reasons to love New York” retrospective. Bruce Markusen at The Hardball Times posted this piece about […]
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Well, he is holding a baseball bat, so that’s good enough for me. Besides, Breaking Curve Bad is one of my favorite shows.
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(Kids, ask your parents/grandparents.) One of my pre-season amusements is to purchase baseball magazines and study their predictions, especially for who will get to the post-season. Somewhere on my other blog is an analysis of how they’ve done in seasons past. This year PunditTracker has done the work for me. The San Francisco Giants get […]
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Graig Kreindler got a nice write-up in Hyland Magazine which was, according to the publisher, “created strictly for subscription on the iPad,” (booo). If you have an iPad, God bless. If not, and you’re on Facebook, you can read the individual panels here.
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I will always have a soft spot for Mental Floss, the publication that assigned me my first cover story (which you can read here from a very early attempt at a website. I’m amazed it’s still available.) So here’s their latest baseball quiz, with Jeter as the focus. I missed four of the 11 players […]
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Years ago I wrote a piece for E, The Environmental Magazine about how some Major League teams were getting on the “green” wagon, recycling, cutting back on water usage, etc. I kept hoping to return to the topic, but this piece by Elliott Negin, Director of News & Commentary, Union of Concerned Scientists, on the […]
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It’s a wonderful magazine, especially when it comes to its baseball writing. And now that they’ve added “The Sporting Scene,” a blog component, fans don’t have to wait as long for pieces by Roger Angel, who published this piece about R.A. Dickey. Granted, it’s not as in-depth as his usual semi-annual essays, but half an […]
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Last week, Matt Cain tossed the Giants’ first perfect game in franchise history. This was immediately compared with the one by the White Sox’s Philip Humber’s against the Oakland As in April, which may have gotten assistance from the home plate umpire on a swinging/held up third strike to end the game. The New Yorker […]
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With the Washington Nationals doing so well, it’s not surprising that some media outlets are jumping on this unlikely bandwagon. The Atlantic posted this article about the local fans behavior, unaccustomed as they are to being in a position where they can lord it over lesser ball clubs (like the Mets). The Washington Post, on […]
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S.L. Price gives Texas Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton the star treatment with an in-depth profile. Cross your fingers that no ill befalls the outfielder, as was the case for Matt Kemp a few weeks ago. Price was the guest on a recent Inside Sports Illustrated podcast to talk about the background of his story (the […]
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♦ Albert Chen wrote this Matt Kemp feature. ♦ Joe Sheehan’s stat corner: players whose HR/Fly Ball ratio are pretty impressive. ♦ Sheehan on the surprising Baltimore Orioles.
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A hamsa is the Jewish symbol for protection. Although I know my daughter doesn’t cotton to such gestures, I have her one before she started college. Here’s one “featuring” Hank Greenberg that appears in an on-line baseball magazine published by EephusLeague.com, wonderfully eclectic baseball entity for the artistically oddball items of the game. The navigation […]
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Recent baseball items from non-sports publications include: “Why Baseball Managers Don’t Make The (Relative) Big Bucks,” from Time. April may be the cruelest month, but it was also a weird one, according to The Atlantic website.
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A periodic attempt to catch up on recent items and links. ♦ I love this entry by SB Nation’s Grant Brisbee on the 17-inning game between the Red Sox and Orioles on May 6 because it’s so damn literary, comparing the sportswriter’s hyperbole to the epic storyteller. ♦ And this one brief from The Hardball […]
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TAOF is now in paperback, so I guess it’s time for another round of fawning articles. (I found it interesting when I saw it at my local Barnes and Noble: there was a “sticker” on the cover that declared: A New York Times Book review BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR It has obviously been designed […]
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Ben Reiter wrote this piece on the newest hot team in baseball, the Washington Nationals, while Tom Verducci provides this on Phil Humber’s perfect game.
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Well, maybe just two mags. South Jersey Magazine ran this cover-story profile on the Phillies’ new closer, Jonathon Paplebon. And with the Hofstra University program on the Mets rapidly approaching, the April 30 cover of New York Magazine teased with a refer to what turns out to be a very small item about the team’s […]
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The Miami Marlins, apparently. This Forbes piece calls the franchise “The Most Overexposed Team in Sports,” citing recent feature stories in Time magazine, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times, not to mention the Marlins’ gig as the focus of the new season of HBO’s The Franchise. (It was the Time piece […]
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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
