From the category archives:

Non-fiction

Big League Stew, a Yahoo sports blog, conducted this audio interview with the author of Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball.

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TWIBB: July 2, 2010

July 2, 2010

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, July 2. Title Rank General Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis 1 Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden 2 The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Scott Turbow […]

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And Ozzie, too, of course. Made a major faux pas, thanks to the evil Facebook, which notified me that Logan Miller, whose film Touching Home garnered major praise, was also celebrating a birthday today. What it didn’t mention (duh!) was that it was also his twin brother and collaborator, Noah’s, birthday as well. The management […]

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The Deaf Times published this profile of Jim Johnson, author  of the 2008 biography “Dummy” Hanson: A Deaf Baseball Pitcher’s Life in the Hearing World.

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Bits and pieces

June 27, 2010

* The Book Corner posted this review of Stephen King’s Blockade Billy. Upshot: The book “will definitely satisfy Stephen King readers as well as those who don’t normally go for the sort of stories on which he made his reputation. And it’s closer to those kinds of stories than the story that fills out the […]

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TWIBB: June 25, 2010

June 25, 2010

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, June 25. Title Rank General Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis 1 Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden 2 The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View, by Doug Glanville 3 The Bullpen Gospels: Major […]

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More on Madden

June 24, 2010

The Dorchester Reporter posted this Clark Booth review of Bill Madden’s latest title, Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball. Upshot: “It is, I believe, a decidedly important baseball book. Bill Madden is the man to tell it.”

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More on Merkle

June 24, 2010

Apropos to my conversation with Mike Cameron, author of Private Bonehead, Public Hero: The Real Legacy of Fred Merkle, here are a few videos mentioned in his book, as well as bonus featuring a much younger Keith Olberman.

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Part II, Again, sorry for the mistake in the publisher’s name. Again, the correct name is Sporting Chance Press. http://www.ronkaplansbaseballbookshelf.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Pod2BCameron062310.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Had so much fun the first time, I thought I’d try to make it a regular feature. So for this week’s RKBB podcast, I spoke with Andy Wasif, author of Red Sox Fans are From Mars, Yankee Fans Are from Uranus, and Mike Cameron, who published Private Bonehead, Public Hero: The Real Legacy of Fred […]

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“King Carl” was born this date in 1903. The Hall of Famer was the subject Carl Hubbell: A Biography of the Screwball King, by Lowell L. Blaisdell, and A Pitcher’s Moment: Carl Hubbell and the Quest for Baseball Immortality, by Fritz A. Buckallew. he also ostensibly contributed a chapter on pitching for Joe DiMaggio’s 1949 […]

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Eddie Lopat, born this date in 1918. From 1948 through a partial season in 1955, The lefty from NYC won 113 and lost 59 and was 4-1 in seven World Series starts. He was one of the subjects of Sol Gittleman’s Reynolds, Raschi and Lopat: New York’s Big Three and Great Yankee Dynasty of 1949-1953, […]

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The Hall of Fame speedster turns 71 today. Although there are no books about Brock, per se, you can’t pick up any volume that analyzes baseball wheeling and dealing without a major mention of the 1965 transaction that switched Brock for St. Louis pitcher Ernie Broglio. Such titles include Trade Him!: 100 Years of Baseball’s […]

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TWIBB: June 18, 2010

June 18, 2010

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, June 18. Title Rank General Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden 1 The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca 2 Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James […]

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Yesterday, actually (close enough for jazz), that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho changed how the movie industry dealt with sex and violence, for better or worse. There are several interesting analyses, including David Thomson’s The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, which I’m reading at the moment, as well as this from […]

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The Sultan of Stats

June 17, 2010

Allan Roth did not invent baseball statistics. Henry Chadwick introduced those in the late 1800s, mostly for the benefit of the fans. What Roth did — first for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers and later for network television broadcasts — was show how they could be used proactively, rather than as an afterthought published by newspapers […]

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Welcome to Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf, the podcast! Bear with us; this is a work in progress. We’ll get it right as time goes by. In the first installment, we chat with Bill Madden, veteran NY Daily News sportswriter and columnist, about his NY Times‘ bestseller, Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball. You can read […]

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The former catcher who played 15 years — mostly for the Toronto Blue Jays — turns 58 today. He published Catch: A Major League Life, co-written with Greg Cable, in 1989.

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by Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic, with Andrew Chaikivsky. ESPN Books, 2010 A caveat and a confession: While “hate” may be too strong a word, I “intensely dislike” sports-talk radio. The idea of (supposedly) grown men and women getting apoplectic on the air over Oliver Perez or Ron Artest or Bill Belichick, et al…not my […]

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To Thurman Munson, who would have been 63, believe it or not.

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