Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Just a few quickies to commemorate the occasion: 64 Major Leaguers were born on Independence Day. The first was Levin Jones (1847) who had 11 at-bats in three games over two seasons (1873-74) for the Baltimore Statistics (now there‘s a nickname). The most recent is Junior Perez (2001) who made his debut this year with […]
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I have a confession to make. When I was a young kid, I would swipe coins from my mother’s purse to feed my habit: buying baseball cards. At first it was just nickels for a wax pack of five cards and that gold ole flat stick of stale bubble gum. Then I got into the […]
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Abbott: Strange as it may seem, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names. Costello: Funny Names? Abbott: Nicknames, nicknames. Now on the St. Louis team we have Who’s on first, What’s on second. I Don’t Know’s on third… They don’t ’em nicknames like that anymore. Oh, sure, Baseball-Reference.com might include a current player’s nom […]
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Because they can go right next to a bookshelf. An advert for a company that produces what looks like cool metal “posters” popped up on my Facebook feed. With my birthday fast approaching, I thought I would treat myself. I was curious to see if they included two of my favorites: Hank Greenberg and Sandy […]
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I don’t know what made me think of it, but I wanted my Maypo. Those of you old enough will recall that Maypo was a breakfast cereal, an oatmeal mish-mash that had a hint of maple flavor. It was a treat in our household because we were fairly poor when I was a kid and […]
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Earlier this month I posted “Another reason why predictive baseball magazines can be useless.” But I had never see any outlet try to revise these things. Today, The Athletic posted “MLB season predictions 2.0: How did the first two months impact our picks?” Who could have known that the Mets would be so stinko? Many […]
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A down-and-dirty post in honor of the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, from June 2016. I’ve always gotten a chuckle when a non-professional cook comes out with a book on food. Are they really offering anything new besides their picture on the cover? Case in point: The sample available on Amazon offers just one recipe: Grand […]
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What is this? Joe DiMaggio Campanella Brooklyn’s got a winning team Mickey Mantle California baseball First one to get it right wins an autographed copy of 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die.
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Wasn’t expecting to have more to say about Vermont baseball following Tuesday’s post but… We discovered a library on the Smugglers Notch premises, the type where guests “borrow” books and leave behind those they have finished while vacationing, rather than schlep them back home. I had read […]
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Rather than pull something out of the Bookshelf archives, I thought for something a bit different this week. The good news is that I got to watch the Yankees beat the Giants, 7-0, in the season opener. Normally, I would not be able to watch a game with an 8 p.m. start because I have […]
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As a partner to “Throwback Thursday”… In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I hauled out this article I wrote for Irish America magazine some 13 years ago on the influence that community had on the national pastime. Irish ballplayers have helped to shape baseball ever since the game took its first foundering steps on the playing fields […]
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Or not. For some, 13 is actually a lucky number. But for others… Baseball is notorious for have superstitions. Remember this scene from Bull Durham (WARNING: Explicit language) Here are just a few books that deal with baseball superstitions: The Incomplete Book of Baseball Superstitions, Rituals, and Oddities, by Mike Blake Field of Magic: Baseball’s […]
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At Texas Women’s University, “Fiction class goes deep into baseball literature.” There is a literary quality to baseball. From the lyrical of W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe to the irreverence of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, the chronicles of David Halberstam, the eccentricity of Bill Veeck’s Veeck As In Wreck and the satire of Philip Roth’s The […]
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I love backstories, whether they’re superhero original tales or something like “Revealed: The TV Manufacturer Whose Set Design Was Used on 1955 Bowman Baseball Cards” from the Sports Collectors Daily website. Bonus points for citing one of my favorites, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book, first published by Brendan C. […]
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As I mentioned in the previous entry, Topps traditionally reserved baseball cards ending in “00” for the cream-of-the-crop elite players (not sure about other sports). With one exception, there were at most only seven available “00” slots. Yearly output ranged from 210 in 1955 to a whopping 825 in 1993. It makes sense that the […]
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My wife has been in a number of book groups over the past twenty or so years. Once a year, the husbands are invited to participate. In all that time, we’ve only discussed one book about sports (if you consider Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike a sports book). So this story from the Washington […]
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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
