Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing, by Joe Bonomo (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) There are a handful of people I would love to have on as a guest for a Bookshelf Conversation, the podcast segment of this blog: James Earl Jones, Dennis Haysbert, John Thorn and, […]
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For the Good of the Game: The Inside Story of the Surprising and Dramatic Transformation of Major League Baseball, by Bud Selig with Phil Rogers There’s a scene in the movie Lincoln, in which the president, working on a telegram in the middle of the night during a watershed moment of the Civil War, asks […]
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Red Foley’s Cartoon History of Baseball. Illustrated by S.B. Whitehead (Little Simon/Simon & Schuster, 1992) When I posted about Alex Irvine’s The Comic Book Story of Baseball, I also had Red Foley’s book in mind. Foley, a longtime sportswriter and official scorer, published this lively little number in a relatively more innocent era. The players […]
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The Ultimate Boston Red Sox Time Machine Book, by Martin Gitlin (Lyons Press, 2020) Why is it the older I get, the more events that transpired recently become “history.” Oh, wait, 1967. I guess that’s not exactly recent. But books like Time Machine serve to make me feel old. Congrats. And you know how I […]
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State of Play: The Old School Guide to New School Baseball, by Bill Ripken (Diversion Books, February 2020) I’m not sure what to make of this contribution by Bill Ripken, the former major leaguer and now and ESPN analyst. On the one hand, he expresses a number of sentiments I share about the new metrics […]
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I use a question mark because the road to hell is paved with good intentions. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to increase my reading. I used to employ one of those speed-reading methods and thought that if I got back to it on a regular basis, I could get through a book a […]
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I don’t watch a whole lot of the MLB Network. I find the shows repetitive, since they show the same programs multiple times over the course of a week. But suddenly a documentary about Dave Parker showed up on my DVR as part of the “MLB Presents…” series. I often just delete these things, but […]
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My review of the latest Moneyball-type book was published on BookReporter.com last Friday.
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I don’t engage in a whole of lot of “beach reading.” For one thing, I hate the beach. Love the ocean, the sounds, the smells. But lying on the sand and baking? Not for me. Occasionally, I’ll get an email a baseball novelist asking me to take a look at his or her book. My […]
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As mentioned the other day, here’s the mid-summer “Roundup Review” which appears on Bookreporter.com. Heavy on the NY teams (sorry, all you out-of-towners), but there are a couple of others so don’t be a hater.
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Every year, I buy a pack or two of Topps baseball cards, just to see what they’re up to. At the risk of sounding like a GOML (“Get off my lawn”) grump, I firmly believe the cards were “better” when I was a kid. Sure, the photography and production methods have improved, the colors are […]
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Just posted on Bookreporter.com. Enjoy.
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Headnote: 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 goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one […]
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I will watch any movie or TV program that has baseball as a main component of the story. So I was quite disappointed when I didn’t get to see The Catcher Was a Spy, based on Nicholas Dawidoff’s wonderful 1994 bio of Moe Berg, at the theaters. Should have realized by how quickly it moved […]
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Via Bookreporter.com. Just to add a bit… One of the things I enjoyed most about this new look was the impact Ruth had on not just the way the media covered sports, but the whole concept of celebrity culture. There’s not a whole lot in the way of the Bambino’s exploits on the field, but […]
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I’m Keith Hernandez? How could he miss mentioning Sienfeld’s show? E-3.
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The legendary umpire, who did not lack for self-assurance, passed away Saturday at the age of 87. Doug Harvey, who had been in failing health for a few years, published They Called Me God: The Best Umpire Who Ever Lived with veteran baseball journalist Peter Golenbock in 2014. I reviewed that one, along with Al […]
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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
