Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
There something to be said about the heft of a book on your lap that a website, regardless of how visually well done or informative, can never match. While preparing for this review, I couldn’t help but think of the Total Baseball series which produced eight editions beginning in 1989 and ending in 2004. These […]
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I have an ongoing DVR thing set up for MLB Network documentaries. Since I don’t watch that channel regularly (believe it or not), I never know what’s going to appear on the list until it shows up. Sometimes it’s not a “major motion picture,” but recently I got to watch “One of a Kind,” about […]
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A reminder: 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 posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes (see my piece on “Why Amazon’s search engine sucks“). In addition, occasionally […]
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Sort of. These both appeared recently on Bookreporter.com: The Yankee Way: The Untold Inside Story of the Brian Cashman Era, by Andy Martino Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, by Keith O’Brien.
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Since it was fairly moderate yesterday I decided to tool around the attic in yet another attempt to purge. That’s where I have the bulk of my library as well as other baseball-related items, including a foot locker of baseball cards. Problem with trying to clean up is that you get caught up in a […]
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They say you never have a second chance to make a first impression. Well, duh. But you may have a second chance when it comes to a book review. I often wonder about professional critics. What kind of expertise do they have in the topic they’re writing about? What was their mood when they wrote […]
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I have been contributing to Bookreporter.com for nigh on to 25 years. They’ve always been quite generous when it comes to my spouting off, mostly on baseball literature, giving me the space for several feature-length pieces. Here’s my latest “roundup review” which includes: THE 1998 YANKEES: The Inside Story of the Greatest Baseball Team Ever […]
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There are scores of new books coming out about the national pastime but two early runners for “most fun” have to be Baseball’s Memorable Misses: An Unabashed Look at the Game’s Craziest Zeroes, by Dan Schlossberg, and Major League Debuts 2023 Edition, by James Bailey. It’s amazing that Schlossberg, with almost 40 baseball titles in […]
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The Death and Resurrection of Baseball: Echos from a Distant Past, by William R. Douglas From time to time I wonder how much longer baseball will last. Will the astronomical salaries paid to players who have little allegiance to a particular franchise finally turn off working-class fans, fed up with ever-increasing ticket prices? Will the […]
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While I was chatting with Jon Leonoudakis about his latest documentary, Ball Four Turns 40, I remembered that one of my earliest interviews was with Jim Bouton. This was in the pre-Covid, Pre-Zoom days when I was doing everything on a digital tape recorder over the phone or in person (and the fidelity or lack […]
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How to Beat a Broken Game: The Rise of the Dodgers in a League on the Brink, by Pedro Moura. People have been complaining about baseball for as long as there’s been baseball. In doing research for any number of projects, one can look at the archives of local newspapers or The Sporting News or […]
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A History of the World Series, by Tyler Kepner, on Bookreporter.com.
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Reading Ron Shelton’s wonderful book, The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit — which I reviewed for an upcoming post on Bookreporter.com — I was interested in seeing the trailer again. I wondered if it was “true to the final product.” Many […]
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Just Like Me: When the Pros Played on the Sandlot, by Kelly G. Park (Sunbury Press, 2020) Guilty pleasure time: One of the things I’ve been doing during my convalescence is binging some shows I had previously overlooked. One such program is Young Sheldon, since I was a big fan of The Big Bang Theory. […]
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Got this one when it came out last year, but given my deep-seated reluctance to deal with baseball fiction, the surprise isn’t that it took so long to read (and write about) it, but that I got to it at all. I have given this hesitancy a name: I call it “The Art of Fielding […]
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My review of Andy Martino’s Cheated: The Inside Story of the Astros Scandal and a Colorful History of Sign Stealing, as per Bookreporter.com.
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My annual spring “review roundup” is on Bookreporter.com. This years titles include GATHERING CROWDS: Catching Baseball Fever in the New Era of Free Agency, by Paul Hensler THE RESHAPING OF AMERICA’S GAME: Major League Baseball After the Players’ Strike and AMERICA’S GAME IN THE WILD-CARD ERA: From Strike to Pandemic, both by Bryan Soderholm-Difatte THE […]
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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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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
