Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Speaking of NPR… Just happened to be flipping through the dial yesterday and came across The Brian Lehrer Show. Since it was a holiday, this was a highlights show, which included two segments on listeners’ memories of Shea and Yankee Stadiums, both of which closed with their team’s final home games in 2008.
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Terry Cashman’s most popular hits had to be “Talkin’ Baseball” and “Willie, Mickey, and the Duke,” a paean to New York centerfielders. But a close third was “Play-by-Play (I Saw it on the Radio).” The (Transplanted) Nation blog (Red Sox), posted this entry about how Bobby Thompson’s home run, as broadcast on radio and TV, […]
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How did the Brooklyn Dodgers get their name? According to a recent edition of NPR’s Studio 360, you can thank Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, who were battling it out to see whose system of electricity would prevail. Mike Daisey narrated a segment on “Tesla vs. Edison”: There was a trolley running in Brooklyn on […]
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Former Yankee favorite Bill “Moose” Skowron was the guest for the “Not my Job” segment of this week’s “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.” You can listen to the segment here. Skowron was saddled with questions about Michael Jackson, about whom, of course, he knew nothing.
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Recent baseball segments on NPR programs include: A Man and His Mitt: A love Story, All Things Considered, March 28. The page includes the essay, which appears in the new anthology Anatomy of Baseball Also on March 28, The Leonard Lopate Show asked the question “Are Baseball Players Worth Their Salaries?“ League Catches Fans Using […]
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NPR’s Fresh Air replayed this May 2007 interview with Costner to mark the release of his latest movie, Mr. Brooks, on DVD. The interviewer is with Dave Davies. Costner discusses his love for the game (not coincidentally the title of his trilogy of baseball films; and no, The Upside of Anger, in which he plays […]
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The second production of short baseball fiction from Symphony Space, which originally aired Oct. 12, 2007 by Public Radio International, featured: Various authors, Baseball Haiku, read by Alec Baldwin and Isaiah Sheffer (from Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game, W.W. Norton). Frankly, I couldn’t always catch the 17 syllables that make […]
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Thanks to the powers that be for producing two sessions of top notch baseball stories read at Manhattan’s Symphony Space. The stories in this section, which aired on Sept. 28, 2007 by Public Radio International, include: James T. Farrell, “My Grandmother Goes to Comiskey Park,” read by John Shea (from My Baseball Diary, Southern Illinois […]
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OAG host Bill Littlefield interviewed Bill Felber, author of A Game of Brawl, which takes a look at the 1897 championship game between the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Beaneaters. Listen to the entire Oct. 13 show here. (Real Player required).
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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
