Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
In 1991, I “auditioned” for a new softball team. I had been playing slow pitch/arc in town but had become a bit bored, so when some old friends from Brooklyn told me about their fast-pitch team in Freehold, I thought I’d give it a shot. In the first at bat of the first day of […]
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Jim Baker posted this amusing entry on SB Nation regarding “Baseball Books for Boys” that certainly weren’t around when I was a kid. Baker previously posted these items on ersatz baseball pulp fiction and comics.
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This could be a Twilight Zone episode. There’s till time to get a gen-u-ine Connie Mack Christmas card, along with other little Philadelphia A’s knick-knacks, via eBay.
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A few months ago Bob Costas and Jerry Seinfeld sat down to deconstruct the famous Abbot and Costello routine, Who”s on First. Jimmy Fallon recently took it a step further in this bit feature Seinfeld, Billy Crystal and a couple of other guys regular viewers of the show probably recognize. Of course this one, by […]
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Craig Robinson is one of my favorite Internet friends. One of his websites offers unusual graphical representations of ideas (infographics), such as how tall Alex Rodriguez’s salary would be in penny form (short answer, miles). Robinson published Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure, a collection of his work last year, which I highly […]
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This goes back aways, but David Roth wrote about R.A. Dickey, mold-breaker for the concept of the cliched athlete, in the July 9 issue of New Yorker. More recently, Will Leitch offers these thoughts about the Mets in a “reasons to love New York” retrospective. Bruce Markusen at The Hardball Times posted this piece about […]
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We call them trucks; the British call them “lorries.” We call them garter belts; the British call them “suspenders.” We call them elevators; the British call them “lifts.” We call them baseball caps…
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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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For you movie buffs out there, from TheChive.com from a piece about The Shawshank Redemption: Andy and Red’s opening chat in the prison yard, in which Red is pitching a baseball, took 9 hours to shoot. Morgan Freeman pitched that baseball for the entire 9 hours without a single word of complaint. He showed up […]
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Or are there more and more athletes who are available for Facebook friendship and Twitter following? I just checked FB and saw A.J. Hinch, Joe Torre, and Dave Kingman under “People you may know…” The same applies for Twitter. Is anyone out there friends of these former ballplayers and are they the real deal? Seems […]
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(Kids, ask your parents/grandparents.) One of my pre-season amusements is to purchase baseball magazines and study their predictions, especially for who will get to the post-season. Somewhere on my other blog is an analysis of how they’ve done in seasons past. This year PunditTracker has done the work for me. The San Francisco Giants get […]
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There’s a saying in baseball that each game give you the opportunity to see something you’ve never seen before. This, courtesy of Michael Morse and the Washington Nationals, tops my list. How many of us as kids have pantomimed a grand-slam swing?
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As part of her birthday celebration, I took my wife to the Thomas Edison Museum in West Orange, NJ. She’d been asking to go for a long time and I pretty much have no patience for museums unless there’s a baseball or pop culture connection. She wanted to buy a refrigerator magnet as a memento […]
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Making my regular Amazon run for new baseball e-books, I came across The History of Baseball: The Definitive Learning Guide, published by an outfit called Course Hero and via Charles River Editors. There is no single author or group of authors credited with this title. I have no knowledge of Course Hero, nor have I […]
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A run scoring on a throw back from the catcher to the pitcher? Really?
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Remember this? Well, now there’s this:
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I was doing one of my regular searches to see what’s coming down the pike vis-a-vis baseball titles. One thing that stood out because the covers were very similar was a number of books that look like this. — The artwork looks like it comes right out of a generic stock photo site. The publishers […]
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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
