Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
but I was tickled to be included in Bookreporter.com’s “Bookaccino Live” zoom meeting last week with other long-time contributors to the site as it celebrated its 24th anniversary. Not exactly sure how long I’ve been associated with this wonderful group, but it’s gotta be at least 18 years. Since then I’ve done scores of reviews, […]
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Both of which appeared on Bookreporter.com last week as one of my semi-regular baseball features.
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My review of Mitchell Nathanson’s new bio, Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original is now up on Bookreporter.com.
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My review of the new book about the Nationals’ unlikely 2019 season is up on Bookreporter.com.
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I’m am the poster child when it comes to falling down the rabbit hole. Whenever a book by a writer I especially respect refers to additional material, I will seek it out more often than not. While going through The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, Keith […]
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Via Bookreporter.com.
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Baseball Card Vandals: Over 200 Decent Jokes on Worthless Cards, by Beau Abbott and Bryan Abbott (Chronicle, 2020) As I was looking through various sites in an attempt to buy the latest set of Topps, I came across an old friend, Baseball Card Vandals, the brain child of brothers Beau and Bryan Abbott. I discovered […]
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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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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
