Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Actually, I take that back. If these authors had excelled on the diamond, they would have just been a few out of thousands. But as it turns out, baseball’s loss was literature’s gain. According a Mental Floss blog entry on “11 prominent authors who excelled in sports”: Prior to his career as New Journalist and […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
They never show fans running on to the field because they don’t want to encourage that sort of behavior, but sometimes it can be more entertaining than the actual game. Originally from Sports Illustrated‘s Extra Mustard blog: “A fan ran onto the field during last night’s Cardinals-Mets game. The takedown stinks, but the key here […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
If Bernard Malamud’s The Natural was supposedly based on the shooting of Eddie Waitkus, where’s a similar volume on Billy Jurges? On this date in 1932 — 17 years before the Waitkus incident — Jurges, a 24-year-old playing for the Cubs, was shot by a “deranged” fan who threatened suicide and but for his lunging […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The composer of “Meet the Mets” died June 30 at the age of 84. From the JTA’s Eulogizer blog: Ruth Roberts, 84, wrote ‘Meet the Mets’ Ruth Roberts, a popular song composer whose work was sung by millions of New York Mets fans and the Beatles, among many others, died June 30 at 84. Roberts […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
From Abebooks.com, a new twist on the old theme of losing one’s prized baseball card: Using it as a place keeper but forgetting to remove it when selling the volume to the local used book store. THE SPORTING “A Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card. It was the original 1952 Topps #311 baseball card and not […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Van Lingle Mungo, born 100 years ago today, pitched for 14 seasons (1931-43,1945) for the Brooklyn Dodgers and NY Giants. While he wasn’t a superstar, he did win 120 games, including four seasons of 16 or more victories. Somewhere I have a paper I delivered, deconstructing the out the Dave Frishberg song about players from […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Here’s something you don’t see every day: a 3-2-6-1-5-3-4-6-8 double play pulled off by the Double-A New Britain Rock Cats against the Binghamton Mets. You need a scorecard with extra large boxes for that one.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Or, “The Cursed Pen.” What is it with the current batch of players who desire to be writers? First it was Mets knuckleballer R.A. Dickey who announced in spring training that he was going to pen a memoir. So he’s currently 2-5 with a 4.50 ERA and just came out of his start against the […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The American troubadour turned 70 yesterday. So what does Dylan have to do with baseball? (Is that a rhetorical question? Obviously, or I wouldn’t have asked it.) In 2006, Dylan featured baseball music and poetry in his “Theme Time Radio Hour” on XM Satellite Radio. The one-hour program, available on CD, consisted of several of […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
As long as it’s just one or the other, that’s not too bad… This comes from Great Scot!, a blog from Scot Drucker, a minor league pitcher in the Tigers’ system: “Someone is going to get seriously hurt or injured“
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
“MLB probes Dodgers’ Ethier for obscene gesture” Two thoughts: A) What are they hoping to find and where, exactly? B) Isn’t that a bit harsh punishment for flipping the bird to someone?
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
“You got to have a lot of little boy in you to play this game.” Even if the game is “just” softball. Thanks to my own senior softball team manager, Sam, for passing this along.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Because you can put brains on a bookshelf, which is where this guy obviously left his. (Courtesy demotivationals4U.com)
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The veteran pitcher turns 34 today. Last year he gathered some of his teammates to collaborate on the yummy Chicago Cubs Cookbook: All-Star Recipes from Your Favorite Players.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
So I was tooling around seeing what’s going on around the diamond today and came across an ESPN list of how this year’s rookies are doing. Just looking at the batters, there are three ways of judging their accomplishments: regular statistics, pretty much the kind of info you used to be able to find on […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Apropos to yesterday’s Bits and Pieces entry about rankings of caps and logos, here’s one from the Getting Blanked blog about the best-selling jerseys. Personally I never quite understood wearing someone else’s name on your person, although the whole psychological study of BIRG (basking in reflected glory) is fascinating. (When I played softball at Marine […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
“Any rebroadcast, reproduction [emphasis added] or other use of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited.” Or not: “Library of Congress Buys Audio Archive“: The library will announce the purchase of [emphasis added] the audio recordings on Wednesday. The archive belonged to John Miley, an 80-year-old retired businessman in […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Baseball and The Simpsons. In the latest episode, Grandpa Abe serves as a guinea pig for a drug that will turn him from grumpy to glad. In order to test the product’s viability, the phrama testers experiment with several variations until the seemingly find the right one. The head of the company wants to make […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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
