Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
This it the time of year when the baseball media offer their considered opinions on their favorite prospects. Sometimes they’re spot on, other times, not so much. So I thought, why not apply this to the upcoming “rookie crop” of baseball books? That is, titles that are making their debuts in 2014 — no reprints/reissues […]
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I’m a big fan of audio books. I recently borrowed two titles from the library — The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Mlodinow, Leonard, and 1861: The Civil War Awakening, by Adam Goodheart — that would seem to have nothing to do with the national pastime. But lo and behold the former […]
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501 update: Received the index back for a bit of very minor revising. Then it’s really done. Gratified by the very early interest by members of the media in doing reviews. Bruce Markusen over at The Hardball Times offers another in his series of “baseball card mysteries.” This time it’s Dave Nelson’s 1973 Topps. Speaking […]
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Used to be you had to wait until at least February for the first whiff of baseball lit to be available. Not any more. The Hardball Times Annual and The Bill James Handbook are already out an about. Herewith a few reviews: The Handbook, by SB Nation, ESPN’s Sweet Spot. HBT: Not so much a […]
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Nate Silver can return to more important work.
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Ok, hurication is over. Time to get back to some semblance of normalcy. I hope y’all are okay out there. We came out unscathed save for a couple of days without power; presently we have no cable/Internet service, but no complaints given what so many others are going through. Before the power went out we […]
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Will Leitch published this piece on the reluctance of some sports pundits (as opposed to the hoi poloi of fandom) who are reluctant to embrace the new generation of baseball statistics. Of course this is the time of year when segments of the media that doesn’t normally cover baseball starts up as if they invented […]
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Conducted my semi-regular scan of new titles. Submitted for your interest. It may seem unfair, but I do tend to judge e-books by their cover, especially when they are offered only in that format. It’s an indication of the time and effort the author/publisher puts into the project. Similarly, I’m basing my opinions strictly on […]
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* Baseball Prospectus is adding a mid-season “addenda” to its annual publication: The Call Up 2012. Here are a couple of review, the first from SouthsideShowdown, the second from ValueOverReplacementGrit. My question is: why is a book like this necessary? Those interested in such information would probably find it easier to get the most recent […]
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One of the “problems” working on my book is that I haven’t had as much time to read other books. Several authors have been kind enough to send me their work and I apologize for be so slow to get to them and hope to remedy that in the near future. At the moment, I’m […]
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♦ I don’t usually look at e-books if they haven’t been published on paper as well, but David H. Martinez (The Book of Baseball Literacy: 3rd Edition: Nearly 700 People, Places, Events, Teams, Stats, and Stories – Everything You Need to Know in One Massive Book) has enough of a track record for me to […]
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♦ Tom Hoffarth’s latest 30/30: Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers from the Team at Baseball Prospectus, edited by Steven Goldman, editor-in-chief of BaseballProspectus.com. Upshot: “The top-qualify writing, and heavy-duty thinking, you’ve come to expect from the Prospectus staff is worthy of this heavy-duty bounded hardback (no more paperbacks this time around). The stuff […]
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Matt Kemp has had a wonderful start: Six home runs in the Dodgers’ first 10 games, as well as 16 RBIs, and a BA/OBP/SLG line of .487/.523/1.026. But someone has to be a bit more ambitious, or at least less lazy. ESPN projects a player’s end-of-season/162 game stats based purely on what he has […]
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♦ Bill Jordan at Baseball Reflections on Tim Wendel’s Summer of 68. ♦ Tom Hoffarth kicked off his annual “30 book in 30 days” feature yesterday with Baseball Prospectus 2012. Today’s book is Trading Manny: How a Father & Son Learned to Love Baseball Again, by Jim Gullo. (Here’s another review from The Oregonian.) ♦ Sticking […]
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Bill King of Baseball Reflections posted this piece about some new ideas coming out of the SABR Analytics Conference in Mesa, AZ, March 15-17. John Thorn, MLB’s official historian, will also be there. In 1985, Thorn, along with Pete Palmer, published one of the earlier books on the game’s new generation of metrics in The […]
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Before he began working with an actual publisher, James used to type out The Baseball Analyst on a bi-monthly basis and make copies as needed for distribution. How times have changed. Like SABR’s annual publications, The National Pastime and Baseball Research Journal, the Analysts were contributor-driven. The first issue contains articles such as “Ballpark Effects […]
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So I was tooling around seeing what’s going on around the diamond today and came across an ESPN list of how this year’s rookies are doing. Just looking at the batters, there are three ways of judging their accomplishments: regular statistics, pretty much the kind of info you used to be able to find on […]
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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
Because it’s never too early to be wrong
November 1, 2013
Apropos to a previous entry about poor prognostications, the Las Vegas odds-makers wasted no time in declaring their 2014 World Series favorite: the Los Angeles Dodgers. Call me next October.
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