Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Passing along this interesting email I received today. In light of recent developments, it’s especially timely. Greetings. I am a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, currently working on a dissertation on the history of the song “God Bless America” and its uses after the September 11th attacks. I have developed an online survey on current […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
With apologies to George Harrison. Apropos to this item regarding an article in The Wall Street Journal, Bob Wechsler of the Lehigh Valley News extrapolated on the correlation between players’ initials and statistics.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I looked for some connection here, perhaps he recorded a rendition of “Casey at the Bat” but te best I could come up with was this. Nevertheless, Cronkite was one-of-a kind in the industry. The videos of him reporting the eeath of JFK have been looping since last night and the tributes continue to pour […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
and I’ll be grateful for about 2 1/2 extra years, according to this piece from The Wall Street Journal. … researchers at Wayne State University, major-league players who have nicknames live 2½ years longer, on average, than those without them. On the other hand, I can absolutely refute further findings that “players whose first or […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Bruce Weber, author of As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires (one of my top three books of the year), published this piece in The New York Times’ Week in review section, comapring the roles of arbiters in the legal system and on the baseball diamond. “Have you read Roe v. […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
From the NY Times, this piece on Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel and some potentially unexpect (and univited) guests. Sounds like somebody’s been reading Haunted Baseball past his bedtime. .
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
We won’t be done with the All-Star break until Thursday, so if your baseball Jones gets too strong, watch HBO’s documentary about the Splendid Splinter in Ted Williams: There Goes the Greatest Hitter That Ever Lived. The special premiers Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. EST. Here’s a review from Newsday. You can read Williams’ ESPN obituary […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Just ask Lenny Dykstra, according to this article from Folio, an industry publication. Many of Dykstra’s financial woes stem from the failed launch of the Player’s Club, a monthly magazine for professional athletes he published in partnership with Doubledown Media—a publisher of magazines aimed at the Wall Street elite—which went out of business earlier this […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
From the famous Monty Python “Parrot Sketch.” Why do I bring this up? because Moneyball, the movie, may not be dead after all. Sony Pictures Entertainment has quietly moved to salvage its troubled movie project “Moneyball” by hiring the prominent screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for a quick rewrite, while looking to add Scott Rudin, known for […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
NY fan gets $10K in ‘God Bless America’ suit
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
According to this story in The New York Times, letters from 19th-century baseball luminary Harry Wright was supposed to be put up at auction, butthe FBI thinks they may have been illegally obtained from the NY Public Library. I’m sure many of my readers remember letters when they were written with pen and ink, not […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Given the draft of the script. I’ll watch anything about baseball. Cartoons, documentaries, lousy films (Jackie Robinson was a great ballplayer, but a poor actor). But this draft of the aborted Brad Pitt vehicle would sorely try my patience (Groucho Marx: “Don’t mind if I do. You must try mine sometime.”). Moneyball, the non-fiction neo-classic […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Joe Mauer on the June 29 cover of SI? He was batting .407 when the story was published, which according to Baseball-Reference.com, must have been June 21. Since then? Five hits in 25 at bats, dropping his average 21 points to .386. Zack Greinke had a similar drop off shortly after he appeared. I wonder […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
From Stephen J. Dubner on The New York Times‘ Freakonomics blog (It’s okay; the original Freakonomics still sits on my bookshelf), this assessment of the decline of Western civilization, as evidenced by the boorish behavior of fans at last night’s interleague game between the Mets and Yankees.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Zev Chafets, author of Cooperstown Confidential, published this Op-Ed piece in the June 19 edition of The New York Times (“Let steroids into the Hall of Fame“). will Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, et al now become loyal Times readers? [T]oday’s superstars have lawyers and a union. They know how to use the news media. And […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I must admit, I agree with the SF Chronicle’s Gwen Knapp in her column where she avers that the book was not meant to be a feature film. In fact, the fate of the movie might have been more dramatic than any material “Moneyball” could have provided. What would have constituted the big moments in […]
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
From SFgate.com, the literary master of disaster comments on a teammate’s assertion that he’s persona non grata among the old Oakland As.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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
* Wait til you have grandkids of your own some day
July 24, 2009
According to Bill James, those science fiction books we’ve read for generations about “building” superior humans is never far from he truth. In this blog entry by Dan Steinberg on The Sporting News website, James opines that “steroids serve the function of prolonging youth, that fighting aging and death has been one of civilization’s greatest […]
Tagged as: Bill James, PED, steroids
{ Comments on this entry are closed }