Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
The Dodger Hall of Famer died this date in 1993. His autobiography was also turned into a made-for TV movie, starring Paul Warfield as the catcher and Louis Gossett Jr. as his physical therapist. The Amazon Report on Roy Campanella: It’s Good to Be Alive
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The New York Times published this piece in today’s issue regarding the appeal of the Mets farm club, the brooklyn Cyclones, in the face of the big league team’s troubles of late. In the meantime, watch this unusual situation from last night’s game between the Cyclones and the Staten Island Yankees. The Amazon Report on […]
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who turns 100 today. For someone who played in the 1930s, Werber had some decent pop in his bat. He broke in with the 1930 NY Yankees, as a teammate of Babe Ruth. The best of his 11 seasons came in 1934, when he had career highs in runs scored (129), hits (200), doubles (41), […]
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A lot has been written over the last couple of days (in the New York area at least) about the firing of Mets manager Willie Randolph. It’s not so much that he was fired as much as how the deed was done. How terrible, the sports pundits cried, to do it in the middle of […]
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The All-Star outfielder for the Tigers, Expos, and White Sox turns 60 today. LeFlore wrote about his experiences in prison in Breakout: From Prison to the Big Leagues, which was turned into One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story, one of those terrible ABC Made for TV movies, starring Levar Burton as the ballplayer. […]
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From BaseballGB, which takes a look at the game from across the pond.
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The author of the watershed book on the Black Sox Scandal died yesterday at the age of 88. Asinof published Eight Men Out in 1963; and was released as a John Sayles film in 1988, starring John Cusak, David Strathairn, Charlie Sheen, D.B. Sweeny, and Gordon Clapp, Christopher Lloyd, John Mahoney, Michael Werner, Studs Terkel, […]
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The future Hall of Famer hit home run #600 yesterday, joining Bonds, Aaron, Ruth, Mays, and Sosa. No doubt new books are in the offing. There are already several titles, many for kids, which is fine because Griffey seems like a good role model (comparatively speaking). You never hear his name associated with drugs, drinking, […]
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Tris who? Sid Dorfman laments the anonymity that has befallen Hall of Fame outfielder Tris Speaker, who was the centerfielder before Mantle and Mays came along. Dorfman is a local legend here in Jersey. He’s been writing for the Newark Star-Ledger for more than 70 years, our version of The Washington Post’s Shirley Povich. There’s […]
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From rationalmagic.com, this critique of the graphic novel, The Golem’s Mighty Swing. More on Golem: From TIME Magazine From PopMatters.com From FlakMag.com Several panels, courtesy of New Yorker From Nine, a scholarly baseball journal published by the University of Nebraska Press
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A blast from the past courtesy of the Lansing State Journal. Upshot: …[O]ne book is not responsible for the seismic shift in sports media during the past 40 years, or even the past five years. But it’s part of it, and Bouton’s book is among the first insights that the game, the strategy and the […]
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I’m surprised Peter Golenbock’s ribald tale of Mickey Mantle hasn’t hit the remaindered bin yet. Lasorda’s I Live for This got the treatment just a few months after it published. Anyway, here an excerpt from the audio book as read by Alan Smithee. http://audible.edgeboss.net/download/audible/content/bk/pnix/000053/bk_pnix_000053_sample.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
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A set of mini-reviews, mostly of older titles, from the Desert Sun, including: Playing With The Enemy, A Baseball Prodigy, A World at War and a Field of Broken Dreams, by Gary Moore. Teammates, A Portrait of a Friendship, by David Halberstram. Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, by David Maraniss. The […]
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The recent release of the Indiana Jones movie allows for the tangential connection with Haunted Baseball: Ghosts, Curses, Legends and Eerie Events, wherein coauthor Mickey Bradley is interviewed for this piece in Newsday.
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Catching up a bit: Bob Murcer’s autobiography as reviewed on MLB.com The Griddle on Baseballtoaster.com considers Peter Morris’ latest, But Didn’t We Have Fun? wickedlocal.com, a Massachusetts Web site, reports on an appearance by author Jim Collins at a Cape Cod high school. Collins is the author of The Last Best League: One Summer, One […]
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By Alison Gordon (left). Interesting concept, this “Blue Jays Library in a Box,” from battersbox.ca. Might catch on. Pity there aren’t a lot of books on the subject.
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The surprising member of the Hall of Fame was born this date in 1921. I say surprising because his numbers seem less than impressive, compared with his contemporaries. He had “only” four seasons in which he won more than 20 games and his career total of 207 victories in 17 seasons (some were parts of […]
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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 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
* Life imitates art
June 20, 2008
In the current issue of ESPN The Magazine, Rick Reilly writes about a high school pitcher who deliberately threw at a home plate umpire, instructing his catcher to let the ball go on through. You can read that piece here. The scenario is eerily reminiscent of a scene from Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel […]
Tagged as: baseball fiction, Philip Roth, Rick Reilly, The Great American Novel
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