Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
The Ballpark Bucket List: The Ultimate Scorecard for Visiting All 30 Major League Parks, by James Buckley Jr. How to describe this fun little volume? While it is technically a book, it’s more like a diary, a chance to note a fan’s ambitious goal of visiting every stadium in the big leagues. Each of the […]
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Heard on NPR’s Morning Edition show, March 6: “Evan Drellich’s new book sheds light on the Houston Astros cheating scandal.” I usually don’t mix baseball with politics with baseball (unless it’s in a good way), but this is important enough to me that I don’t care if I ruffle a few feathers by […]
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Does anyone else have these? I have a number of posters that I’ve been hanging in the stairwell to my basement office and came across these 2′ x 3′ jobs that I can only imagine acquiring via sending in box tops from Kelloggs cereals. They’re kind of cool but as the last images are from […]
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Early on, it looks like the big book is Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess, by Evan Drellich. Numerous reviews and features on the Astros’ cheating scandal include “New book on Houston’s sign-stealing scandal illuminates backstory to Cardinals hacking case” from the St. Louis Post Dispatch (paywall); “Reporter who […]
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Wondering how the new rule changes will change the rule book itself. This article from MLB.com makes them seem more complicated than I originally thought. These include: The pitch clock, which not only applies to the pitcher apparently, but the hitter as well who has to be in the batter’s box within a certain time […]
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The expression “a cup of coffee” is defined in The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (Third Edition) as “A brief trial in the major leagues by a minor league player…. The phrase seems to have derived from the observation that a young player’s first taste of the major leagues is usually quite short, figuratively just long enough […]
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I’ve done a series of entries on the things I keep: unusual books, cards, or other items that I’ve collected over the years. One of my “collectibles,” in addition to books, is baseball caps. I’ve got about 30 of them lining the wall of my office. I have this rule that I can’t just buy […]
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Getting closer (hopefully) to pitchers and catchers reporting but there’s still time to catch a good baseball movie. Or a bad one, depending on your point of view. The folks at MLB’s website are offering their choices on various themes. In this entry, they seek to answer the question, “Which baseball film has the best […]
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AKA, the original Mr. Met. Reilly passed away last Dec. 30 at the age of 83. According to the obituary in Jan. 7 issue of The New York Times by Richard Sandomir Mr. Reilly was working in the Mets’ ticket office when two team executives asked him to breathe corporeal life into Mr. Met, who […]
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Whoopsie! In my Dec. 10 “Baseball Best Seller” entry, I made a Fred Merkle-type boner. I inadvertently credited Lincoln Mitchell — author of such non-fiction titles as The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976–1992; San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock and a Third-Place Baseball Team; and Baseball Goes West: The […]
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when articles like appear: Which baseball movie has the greatest Hollywood ending? Where to begin? How about the choice of three films for this panel discussion between Ian Browne, Anthony Castrovince, Alyson Footer (who served as the piece’s writer and moderator), Adam McCalvy, and Manny Randhawa. In what appears to be a series of such […]
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Hard to believe it’s been a month since my last entry. Life, you know? But here’s hoping for a better year ahead. Because people have shorter attention spans these days, there has become a designation for articles that readers just can handle. The shorthand is TLDR: “too long, didn’t read.” That’s a shame. I liken it […]
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I was looking back over the site and came across a number of drafts I pretty much completed but failed to post. Since we’re talking about baseball books and pop culture — which are timeless — and not the latest news, I thought I would make a mini-series of sorts. Unfortunately, some of the reference […]
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“Hey, that’s Crash Davis. He’s played in more towns than I have. Helluva guy — real different. I actually saw him read a book without pictures once” Max Patkin in Bull Durham It may not be a Crash Davis project, but here’s announcing the Noah Syndergaard Book Club (via The New York Times). At least […]
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Because you can keep a wine bottle on your bookshelf… I had the opportunity to speak with Dusty Baker for my next book project. I already knew the Houston Astros manager owned an energy company in his native California. What I did not know is that he’s also a vintner (or at least he owns […]
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It’s a Wonderful Life is one of my favorite movies. I’ll watch the uninterrupted version whenever its on, although I can’t stand it when NBC airs it, turning it into a three hour snoozefest in order to get their current batch of TV series stars yakking about what the movie means to them, not to […]
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In addition to baseball, I’ve always enjoyed me some good science fiction. Right now the missus and I are watching Expanse (Netflix) on the recommendation of some friends. After two episodes, it doesn’t seem to be in my wheelhouse, but they urge us to keep going, comparing it with Battlestar Gallactica (also not really my […]
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Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one […]
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According to a translation site, the header above (pronounced “fushigina hōkō e korogaru”) is the Japanese equivalent of “down the rabbit hole,” which is where I fell after finding a story about Shinji Mizushima, “author of the popular Japanese ‘Dokaben‘ baseball manga series, [who] decided to end his career as a manga artist Tuesday, his […]
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My baseball library is divided into three main sections: the attic, my basement office, and the rest of the house. I was cleaning the attic yesterday, because what else is there to do? While trying to cull the herd, putting things in boxes to eventually give away or ::shudder:: throw out, I can across a […]
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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
