Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
I knew things would go well when I saw the collection of caps behind Tyler Kepner, senior writer for The Athletic and author of The Grandest Game: A History of the World Series and K: A History of of Baseball in Ten Pitches. Like Kepner — and most young baseball fans — I had dreams […]
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My article, “Sandy in Minny: Honoring Him for That,” appears in the latest edition of SABR’s The National Pastime, which was devoted to baseball in the North Star State. Koufax, the Dodger’s Hall of Famer, famously declined to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest […]
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I don’t have a whole lot of hobbies, so when I see a book that combines any of them on my periodic “Coming down the pike” stories, I get extra pumped. Baseball: The Movie covers two of them. Now that I no longer have Turner Classic Movies, since they went to a subscription platform, I […]
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As I keep mentioning, regular readers of The Bookshelf know of my disdain for superlatives and similar declarations, such as “Greatest,” “Worst,” “Complete,” in titles. But there are a few cases in which they seem totally appropriate. In the case of Andy McCoullough’s new (and first) book, Clayton Kershaw just might be The Last of […]
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♦ The Baseball Hall of Fame will hold a screening of Fielding Dreams: A Celebration of Baseball Scouts on Thursday, Jan. 18. “[T]his new documentary goes beyond moneyball [sic] and features dozens of interviews with some of the scouting legends of the game, including 5 scouts who helped build the 2023 World Series Champion Texas […]
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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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New: An asterisk serves to let you know that the author is a member of the Pandemic Baseball Book Club. I enthusiastically recommend you visit the site, sign up for their newsletter, and buy some merch. A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by […]
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Has it really been three weeks since the last one of these? My, my… 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 […]
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Some creators who have appeared in these Conversations have admitted that their project became a chore. For others, it was just a job. And sometimes that shows up in the work. A lot of biographies seem to be showing off the amount of research the author did. Very good, but they kind of read like […]
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I had the enormous good fortune to catch Claire Smith, the newest recipient of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award at the recent Society for American Baseball Research convention. Smith was the first African-American female reporter to cover baseball for a newspaper as a staffer with the Hartford Courant in 1983. She later became a columnist […]
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While most baseball fiction leave me unimpressed, I was an early adopter of the work of Troy Soos, author of the Mickey Rawlings series of historical baseball mysteries. That’s quite an accomplishment when you think of the amount of work it takes to do any one of those well. Soos, who published first his first […]
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One of the things I missed most about not blogging here regularly was the opportunity to conduct these podcast interviews. There’s always someone interesting to talk with a bout their new project, be it a book, a move, a musical album, etc. I spoke with Joe Siegman as a major player in the U.S. Maccabi […]
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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
