Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
When I spoke with Dan Epstein (the author from California, not the photographer for my daughter’s bat mitzva), he reminded me that the first interview he ever did for his first book, Big Hair and Plastic Grass, was for the Bookshelf (you can stroll down memory lane here). So I take full credit for his […]
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The top-ten baseball books as per Amazon.com. Caveat 1: Print editions only (at least for now); I’m old fashioned that way. Caveat 2: Since the rankings are updated every hour, these lists might not longer be 100 percent accurate by the time you read it. But it’ll be close enough for government work. Caveat 3: […]
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This it the time of year when the baseball media offer their considered opinions on their favorite prospects. Sometimes they’re spot on, other times, not so much. So I thought, why not apply this to the upcoming “rookie crop” of baseball books? That is, titles that are making their debuts in 2014 — no reprints/reissues […]
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Another in an attempt to look over the over-looked news in baseball books. I’ve only just begun listening to the unabridged audio book of Bill Bryson’s newest, One Summer: America, 1927, but if Richard “Pete” Peterson says it’s “a good read for Cards, Cubs fans,” that’s good enough for me. Kevin Baker, who worked with […]
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Haven’t done one of these in awhile. * The Washington Times posted this one on Willard Mullin’s Golden Age of Baseball: Drawings 1934-1972, edited by Hal Bock and Michael Powers. * WTOP in Washington DC ran this story and audio interview on Fred Frommer’s You Gotta Have Heart: A History of Washington Baseball from 1859 […]
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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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John Sexton’s Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game picked up a couple of review recently including this one from the New York Law Journal and this one from Philly.com. The San Diego Union Tribune ran this about Inside the Baseball Hall of Fame. Believe it or not (and I’m guessing my […]
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At Home Plate posted this review of Tom Dunkel’s Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line. Upshot: “This book is the story of those men and it’s a great story. One worthy of being read over and over by fans who truly love the game and understand what we all lost during […]
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The critics seem to fall into two main camps: movie critics with no special knowledge about baseball, who based their comments solely on the production values and storytelling and those baseball nerds with lots of knowledge about the topic who were mostly interested in the attention to detail, some to a most picayune level. Let’s […]
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Michigan Live posted this review on John Rosengren’s new biography, Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes. Upshot: “Rosengren…lovingly describes the devotion of American Jews to a man who overcame harassment and flat feet to become not just a baseball star, but an inspiration to his people.” Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a British book […]
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♦ I’m including this piece just because I find it amusing. I hope the Brits don’t get all their baseball info like this. ♦ Who says fiction about the national pastime has to be confined to literature? Here’s a case of fictitious baseball merchandise. ♦ Dan Epstein, author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A […]
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♦ The Washington Post published this piece on Tony La Russa’s memoir, One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season. ♦ Better late than never: It seems the Seattle Post-Intelligencer finally got around to posting a review of Zack Hample’s 2007 publication, Watching Baseball Smarter: […]
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One of the things I’ve come across during my research is that so many readers and writers take this stuff so seriously. As Crash Davis said in Bull Durham, “This game is fun, okay?” But who says you can both have fun and pay proper respect to those who have made the national pastime so enjoyable? […]
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* The New York Times published this review about Ballplayer: Pelotero, a film documentary about baseball in the Dominican Republic. Upshot: “Forget feel-good boys-of-summer tales. This film shows a shady business in which scouts and the teams they represent try to manipulate teenage players, and to some extent the players do some manipulating of their […]
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Several new titles arrived over the past week including: Before the Curse: The Chicago Cubs’ Glory Years, 1870-1945, by Randy Roberts and Carson Cunningham A People’s History of Baseball, by Mitchell Nathanson Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, by Paul Dickson (Of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary fame) The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball […]
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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
