Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Unless that’s a chaw of tobacco gone wrong…
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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, […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Not really, but a funny take on what might be, courtesy of Jon Bois on Fanhouse.com.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Move over, Jose. Roger Clemens wants to join the band of ballplayers turned … well, words fail me. According to news reports, Clemens is considering writing his own book to answer allegations about his use of PED. During an on-line interview on Houstonist.com, the question was asked, “Do you believe that you will get a […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Thanks to Gabriel Schechter, author of This Bad Day in Yankees History, who delivered the following poem at the recent Cooperstown Symposium. Baseball’s Glad Lexicon These are the gladdest of possible words: Dickson has done it again. Trio of volumes each jam-packed with gems From “A-ball” to “lulu” to “zurdo.” Re-shaping his lexicon into the […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Because you can’t beat a dead horse enough: Alyssa Milano: Since nobody cares anymore about Alyssa Milano as an actress anymore, she apparently has concluded that we should all care that she’s a big enough baseball fan to write a book about herself going to games, sell sports-related clothing to women, and seduce at least […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Reading Barra’s Berra bio and came across mention of Yogi and several teammates appearing on an episode of Sgt. Bilko, starring Phil Silvers. Here’s a synposis from IMDB.com Bilko’s Company B gets beaten at Baseball by the WACs and with a big game against Ritzik and Grover coming up he is in dire need of […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Another piece of trivia: Phil Rizzuot was a guest on the premier of the popular TV game show, What’s My Line? (Feb. 2, 1950). I was tickled by the formality between the host and the panelists. Compare that with today’s beauts like Deal or No Deal.
{ 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
