Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
I’m getting ready for this. It will be interesting to see how complex/simple the on-line course is. Too simple can turn off those who already have a good background in the game and its myriad statistical components. Too difficult, and you turn off everyone. See you in class.
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In advance of my Bookshelf Conversation with Jonathan Eig which I will post tomorrow, here’s a blast from the past. Climax! was one of those live-performance anthology television series in the 1950s sponsored by a major corporation, in this case Chrysler. This 1956 episode, The Lou Gehrig Story, starred Wendell Corey as Gehrig, character actor […]
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Accusations of cheating on the diamond. The New York Yankees’ starting pitcher Michael Pineda garnered a lot of attention when he was accused of adding a foreign substance to the ball in a 4-1 win over the Boston Red Sox on April 10. This just happened to come right around the time I watched the […]
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The Passover holidays have played havoc with my schedule, so there’s a lot to catch up on. First off, can you remember those Bicentennial Minutes that CBS used to broadcast in the months leading up to the big celebration? Well, Dan Epstein, author of the new Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial […]
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But how sad is this: The Newark Bears Professional Baseball team and its concessions company are hosting a liquidation sale and auction at 10am on April 26, 2014. Location: Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium, 450 Broad Street, Newark, NJ 07102 Business and personal items will be available for purchase. There will be items offered through set pricing as […]
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As in Extra Hot Great, one of my favorite podcasts. While listening to EHG on my way to work this morning, I learned that Sarah D. Bunting (Bunting!), one of the regular hosts, was absent because she was delivering a paper at baseball conference. I did a quick search and deduced it was this one: […]
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I originally posted this on my blog about Jews and sports since Youkilis is one of the handful of Jewish players, but there’s enough book/movie/collectibles that I can kill two birds with one stone, so… * * * Thanks to Robert Whiting, I have been able to find a way to keep tabs on Kevin […]
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42, the Jackie Robinson bio pic, wasn’t nominated for any Academy Awards this year. Too bad. Not that it was a great film by any means, but still. Baseball. We’ve been talking abut baseball predictions lately, but John Axford had a fantastic run of his own when he batted 1.000 in his Oscar picks. Next […]
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Between now and opening day, every baseball writer/pundit and his or her uncle will be offering their predictions for the baseball season. Some outlets go so far as to predict individual award winners. Some enterprising IT person can probably discern the percentage of those who get everything right. It has to be miniscule, right? A […]
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The Wall Street Journal ran this cute piece about several members of the NY Mets who got married during the off-season.
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One of my favorite features in the old Street & Smith annuals was the list of statistical targets (The Sporting News now has that burden/honor). The contemporary players were listed along with the all-timers for major categories such as home runs, RBI, wins, strikeouts, etc. But many of those milestones don’t seem like that much […]
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On the way to work this morning, I was listening to a podcast interview with Andrew Zimbalist for his appearance at the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse earlier this month. As I pulled up to my office’s driveway, they were discussing fielding. Used to be the conventional wisdom was to base a players defensive prowess based on […]
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With Kevin Youkilis trading places with new Yankees acquisition Masahiro Tanaka of the Rakuten Golden Eagles in Japan, I was curious as to how he would adjust to the new culture. Sometimes it work, as in the case of Warren Cromartie; sometimes it doesn’t, as was the case for Jake Elliot (although he did, finally, […]
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While tooling around Amazon, looking to see what interesting baseball titles are on the horizon, I found this: The Best Ever Book of Diamondbacks Jokes: Lots and Lots of Jokes Specially Repurposed for You-Know-Who, by Mark Geoffrey Young. A further look at the author’s other works shows that he’s got a book like this for […]
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According to the Orlando Sentinel, “Mark Gilbert, a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser from Boca Raton, may be on his way to New Zealand and Samoa” as U.S. ambassador. If Gilbert’s name seems at all familiar, you’re an older baseball uber-fan: Gilbert appeared in seven games for the Chicago White Sox in 1985, batting .273 in […]
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I belong to a Baseball Books group on Facebook. Every now and then, a member will post an item heretofore unknown to me. That was the case today when this one came up: Published in 1964 by Paul Molloy, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, A Pennant for the Kremlin seems to fit in perfectly […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
In my most recent "day job," I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted another blog. Busy, busy, busy.
I did a profile piece on the award-winning cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
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
