Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
In my copious spare time, I like to unwind by playing the ukulele. I’m always looking for on-line sources of music, preferring the tunes from the early 1900s and jazz classics. I’m also a Tom Lehrer fan. So it was with a degree of amusement that I found this piece on one of my go-to […]
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There’s something inherently unfair about lumping together post-season records. Prior to 1969, there were just two teams still active after the regular 162 slate of games. Then there were an additional four. An additional round was added in 1995, and, in 2012, an additional game for the Wild Card play-in. So the if all the […]
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In honor of the day, here’s a terribly brief and incomplete list of titles by and about moms and baseball: Minor League Mom: A Mother’s Journey Through the Red Sox Farm Teams, by Pamela Carey Watching the Game, by Judy Lynn Johnson Diamond Moms: A Mother’s Guide to Raising a Baseball Player, by Candace Conradi […]
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Because you can keep your tablet and/or smartphone on a bookshelf. It’s not enough that he’s got several best-selling books out, now he’s expanding into the realm of apps? Dirk Hayhurst, who has more titles in print than years played in the majors (four to two), just released Bush League, described as “essentially a baseball […]
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Is he destined to be a pop culture touchstone? From this week’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me from host Peter Sagal: In just a minute, Carl gets ejected when umpires find rhyme tar on his neck. It’s the Listener Limerick Challenge.
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On this date in 1981: Seattle Mariners manager Maury Wills is suspended for two games as punishment for ordering the grounds crew to enlarge the batter’s boxes at the Kingdome. Wills decided to tamper with the chalk lines after the Oakland Athletics complained that Seattle’s Tom Paciorek repeatedly stepped out of the batter’s box while hitting. […]
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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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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
“Jane, you ignorant slut.”
May 19, 2014
If you can remember the old Saturday Night Live skit — a take-off on 60 Minutes‘ “Point/Counterpoint” segment between conservative James J. Kilptarick and Shana Shana Alexander representing the liberal POV — you might be old enough to get where Boston Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan is coming from when he asks “Do baseball fans […]
Tagged as: baseball statistics, Bob Ryan, FranGraphics, sabermetrics, Saturday Night Live
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