Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
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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Jury those interminable breaks while I was on jury duty, I committed to memory the projected start nines and pitching staffs of all the Major League teams as per Sporting News Baseball. Of course, they have Stephen Strasburg as the Washington Nationals’ starting left fielder, but leave us not quibble. I have come to accept […]
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Fulfilling your civic duty by serving on a jury certainly has its ups and downs. Suffice it to say I am on a case, the details of which I cannot reveal at this point, and will be shuttling back and forth to the courts for the foreseeable future. The “good news”: the schedule is such […]
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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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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
