Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
There’s only one baseball audiobook on my weekly best-seller roundup but while I was putting the entry together I could help but notice: Out of the top 100 audiobooks, 16 have a very similar design, save for the Jenner book in which the author is not facing the camera head on.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Saturday mornings usually meant sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal. Yada, yada, yada. Very sweet, very nostalgic. Well, it’s Saturday morning and I thought I’d use the occasion to offer a few items about our favorite sport. The first one, “Abner, the Baseball,” is at once charming, creepy, and ahead […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Because you can put an autograph in a frame on your bookshelf. Not really sure what MLB means by limiting players signing autographs. One of the insidious parts of this disease is that you can be harboring it without knowing it. So if they really want to be cautious, they shouldn’t have any autographs, at […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Sort of.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Sometimes I get grief when I complain about the quality of baseball films. My friends say I’m being too hard because I know and expect too much. In the words of that great philosopher, Steve Martin But I came across this on Youtube and thought it was pretty cool: Joc Pederson, Justin Turner, and Ferris, […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
The Baseball Maniac’s Almanac: The Absolutely, Positively, and Without Question Greatest Book of Facts, Figures, and Astonishing Lists Ever Compiled, edited by Bert Randolph Sugar with Ken Samelson (Sports Publishing, 2019) I love almanacs. Where else can you find so much information — useful or trivial, interesting or no — in one volume? The Almanac […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
About the World Series. Haven’t done one of these in a long time. I think I even neglected to write when Keith Hernandez was a guest back when his latest memoir — I’m Keith Hernandez: A Memoir — was published last year. But with the Washington Nationals winning the first championship for the nation’s capital […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Was driving when I heard some interviews ahead of Game Seven of the World Series. Whoever was speaking started to going into the usual things we hear in this situation. These aren’t the actual remarks, but the sentiment is definitely there. “There’s no tomorrow” “It’s do or die.” “We have to leave it all on […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
If you are a Facebook friend, you know my feelings about our sitting president. I have tried to keep all of that out of this site, believing baseball is a refuge from the cares and woes of the outside world. Unfortunately, the reaction of the crowd to Donald Trump’s appearance at Game Five of the […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
One of my comfort TV shows is M*A*S*H. If I’m home (and awake) when it airs on ME TV (hold the jokes, please), that’s what I’m watching. The episodes are usually played sequentially, so it was especially interesting that “A War for All Seasons” (season nine, episode six) was on tonight’s schedule. This one follows […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
It might have been a nice idea to pair their recent cover with a Roger Angell story, but I’ll take what I can get.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I subscribe to Scribd.com, a wonderful service which, for a flat fee, allows you to read and/or listen to thousands of books, new and old. While doing my semi-weekly search for new things, I discovered that Hank Greenberg in 1938 (as well as The Jewish Olympics: The History of the Maccabiah Games) is a part […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
“Die Hard” Phillies fan? He wasn’t much better at BP, either.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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 […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
You will forgive a father’s pride, but my daughter, Rachel, a photo editor for iHeart Media, recently compiled this listicle on baseball bobbleheads. I still haven’t gotten over her being a Yankees fan, though. Oh well, can’t have everything.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Just finished Ron Darling’s new book, 108 Stitches: Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game (with Daniel Paisner, who also worked on Darling’s 2016 book, Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life). It’s fairly standard fare. Darling relates stories about memorable players, […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Headnote: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not longer be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them. But it’ll be close enough for government work. In addition, sometimes the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one by including a book in a category to which it […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I was chatting with a co-worker who is about to go to Seattle for vacation. One of the items on his agenda is attending Comic-Con. Seems he’s a collector of Funko figures. Who knew? Evidently these are like the next generation of Beanie Babies. There are probably hundreds of these things, and some of them […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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
If they can put a man on the moon… (the problems with Amazon)
February 22, 2020
why can’t Amazon searches be more specific? Every few months, I look for new titles that are coming out in the near future. For the life of me, I don’t understand why I can’t tailor my search to exclude topics I don’t want, specifically kids’ lit and “romance” novels that somehow feature baseball in their […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }