Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
The Story of the Sensational Baseball Song, by Amy Whorf McGuiggan. University of Nebraska Press, 2009. This slim volume would seem to be the companion for last year’s Baseball Greatest Hit. While the latter was almost a who’s who, what;’s what and where’s where of the game’s unofficial anthem, McGuiggan’s slim volume concentrates more on […]
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by Derek Gentile. MVP Books, 2009. This was one of these titles that, too me and like many movie trailers, was more exciting than the actual product. I was actually expetcing a philosophical (or at least mock) treatise about how the Bronx Bombers reflected many issues of life, the ups and downs, the victories and […]
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Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality, by Jeff Pearlman. Harper, 2009. Over the last several years, almost every baseball fan — and a lot of non-fans as well — have felt a sense of betrayal. Their heroes have feet of clay; the emperor has no clothes. What makes the situation all the more […]
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by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci Doubleday The former manager of the New York Yankees — and one of its most successful — teams up with Sports Illustrated’s senior baseball writer for this unique and somewhat baffling presentation. Although Joe Torre gets top billing as the nominative author, the reader will get the impression that […]
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An Unofficial Journal of Baseball’s Best Fans, Volume #1 By Will Byington It takes a special person to be a Cubs fan. With such a rich history of failure and disappointment, some would call them masochists, but looking at the photos and reading the stories in Byington’s new book, they seem happy enough. (Of course, […]
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A Short History of the Long by, by Peter Keating (ESPN, 2006) Dingers is to literature what ESPN is to journalism. You can’t count on it to be serious, but it sure is fun. Keating’s work has appeared in a well-rounded series of publication. That is, he’s not just a sports guy, so he’s not […]
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Joe Posnanski’s great column on SI.com about which statistics are the best indicators of baseball talent reminded me that I was going to do a review of the 2009 Bill James Handbook. I must admit, I don’t make a habit of reading books of this type. I always enjoyed the Total Baseball books or the […]
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Five Decades of Stadium Memories (Triumph Books, 2008) Compared with some of the wonderful books that have been published about Yankee Stadium’s last season, this slim paperback comes across like a poor stepchild, an afterthought in the world of recorded memory. I know the Mets’ home since 1964 doesn’t have the same cachet of the […]
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It used to be you had to wait until the following year to read about previous season. But now, thanks to all kinds of new technologies, it’s almost instantaneous. Baseball Insider, a special issue of Sports Weekly, does a great job of recapturing the excitement of the 2008 season while examining the strengths and weaknesses […]
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Humbly submitted via the pages of ForeWord Magazine, this non-fiction list of RK’s “essential” baseball reading. I’ll be working on a fiction version soon.
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My feature on tribute books to the stadium is the lead story on the current on-line issue of Bookreporter.com. Titles include: MEMORIES OF YANKEE STADIUM by Scott Pitoniak A YANKEE STADIUM SCRAPBOOK: A Lifetime of Memories by David Fischer YANKEE STADIUM: A TRIBUTE: 85 Years of Memories, 1923-2008 by Les Krantz REMEMBERING YANKEE STADIUM: An […]
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My 40-Year Journey in Pinstripes, by Bobby Murcer with Glen Waggoner (Harper, 2008) Sept. 8 marked Bobby Murcer’s big league debut. That, coupled with his recent passing, makes this an appropriate time to discuss his autobiography. Yankee For Life was a tough one to get through. Not because it was badly written — not at […]
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by Fred Glueckstein (iUniverse) This slim volume focusing primarily on Mantle’s first year with the NY Yankees is basic enough. Glueckstein has obviously done his research quite well. Too well, it might appear, as he relishes in relaying the most minute details, such as the full name and birth dates and places of most of […]
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In 2006, Roy Green published 101 Reasons to Love the Yankees and 101 Reasons to Love the Red Sox. Released by Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, these were nice little books (a similar book about the Mets also came out that year), full of pictures and brief texts about the author’s favorite moments and people for […]
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by Frank Nappi. St. Martin’s Press I don’t ordinarily read baseball fiction aimed at the young adult demographic. Most are simply rehashes of the same story: young athlete, usually a star, faces adversity in the form of another player on his own team or a health crises or another at-home situation; learns valuable lessons, yada-yada-yada; […]
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My review of Mike Lupica’s latest title for “young adult” readers (there’s something inaccurate about that designation; a young adult should probably be in his/her late teens or early twenties, depending on state laws, not the intended audience of 12-16 year-olds. I’m just sayin’.): Mike Lupica, the veteran sports columnist for the Daily News in […]
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from the very stats-oriented blog, Walk Like a Sabermetrician. It would seem that the reviewer did not like this one too much, resorting to key phrases such as “the downside is…”, “the problem is…”, etc. Sounds like heresy, coming from a blog named like this one. Now I’m not a hardcore stats guy, and maybe […]
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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
* "One must be frugal," he said, lighting his $10 cigar with a $100 bill.
December 10, 2008
You have to either be a small child or living with your head in the sand not to know what’s going on in the economy these days. Jobs lost, stocks plunging, parents wondering how they’ll send their kids to college or pay the mortgage. Those who think sports will provide a diversion might be in […]
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