Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Marty Appel was kind enough to send me a copy of the Official 2007 Yearbook of the Israel Baseball League. Appel, who used to handle PR for the Yankees back in the 1970s, has his finger in just about every Jewish/sports pie, including the IBL, the Jewish Major Leaguer Card set, and the Maccabi Haifa […]
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The current issue of ESPN the Magazine includes a cute feature titled “Over the Top,” by Amanda Angel. The Greatest Story Ever Told is about Jesus himself, but these days you’d half-expect to find that title on a bookseller’s spoets shelves. A quick glance at the genre shows many true, real and seemingly impossible epic […]
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Came across an interesting podcast awhile ago, Baseball’s Greatest Hits, produced by author and baseball historian Wayne McCombs for a radio station in Tulsa. Oklahoma. While the program is no longer live, you can still hear several episodes via iTunes, which is where I found this 1948 recording of Elmer, the Great, written by Ring […]
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Abrams publishers has come out with some very neat books over the last couple of years. The house, which specializes in art and photography books recently began a line of perpetual calendars on themes.The main problem reminds me of an episode from my childhood. When I was about 10, we had dinner at a local […]
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With the Mets season just about over, I needed to find new ways to amuse myself. When I was a kid at day camp, we used to play this game, “initials.” One player would think of the name of some baseball player, the other would try to guess. You got a home run if you […]
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From the eclectic PitchersndPoets site comes the “Rogue’s Baseball Index,” a sort of urban dictionary about the national pastime. RBI is divided into several categories, including entries about players, fans, management, media, et al. A random entry: The George Will is a hyper-intellectualized fan who gets so caught up in the history and legend and […]
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A few germane baseball items over the week that I overlooked: In today’s edition, John Klima, author of the recently relased Willie’s Boys: The 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, the Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Baseball Legend (Wiley), published this item on how the Yankees blew their chance to sign Willie […]
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Unless that’s a chaw of tobacco gone wrong…
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Examiner.com, one of the websites that tailors to local communities, ran this piece on what is becoming a franchise book, _____ by the Numbers, in this case the Cubs (with a companion website). Matthew Silverman wrote the first of this genre about the Mets and titles about the Yankees (Bill Gutman) and Red Sox (Bill […]
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Such as Microsoft, according to this piece making the rounds. Microsoft’s Intellectual Property Group is building a financial model designed to value and predict prices for technology patents, allowing the company to better forecast and budget for intellectual property-related costs — all inspired by a best-selling book about baseball…. “I got this idea from reading […]
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In this case, it’s “writing,” at least according to this entry on Seekerville, a blog about the writing craft. In baseball, like any other sport, in addition to having that natural talent, the players must spend years preparing: learning the nuances and rules of the game, conditioning themselves, practicing, playing, learning the “market” (how other […]
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With apologies to George Harrison. Apropos to this item regarding an article in The Wall Street Journal, Bob Wechsler of the Lehigh Valley News extrapolated on the correlation between players’ initials and statistics.
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and I’ll be grateful for about 2 1/2 extra years, according to this piece from The Wall Street Journal. … researchers at Wayne State University, major-league players who have nicknames live 2½ years longer, on average, than those without them. On the other hand, I can absolutely refute further findings that “players whose first or […]
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Thanks to the NY Times’ Freakonomics blog, I came across FlipFlopFlyball, an off-shoot of flipflopflyin.com, which offers some unusual charts regarding the national pastime. In one, we see just how many Native Americans actually live in Cleveland (which gave me a few ideas for future charts)*, an unusual representation of when teams broke the color line, […]
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by Brent Mayne. I put the question mark in there because I’m not sure what to make of this irreverent piece by the colorful Jimmy Scott who reminds me more and more of a Martin Short character. What separates The Art of Catching from any other book, like A Tale of Two Cities or The […]
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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 blog 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
* Weathermen and sports journalists (con't.)
October 7, 2009
So I went back to the baseball publications that came out prior to opening day. These included only national publications (i.e., no newspapers that might show favoritism for the home team): Baseball America, USA Today Sports Weekly, Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine, Athlon, Lindy’s, The Sporting News (which took over my old pals, Street and […]
Tagged as: Baseball magazines, predictions
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