Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
♦ James Bailey posted this review of Baseball Prospectus’ Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers from the Team at Baseball Prospectus. Upshot: “Overall, this is a satisfying and thought-stoking release, with much of it coming from a different angle than you might be accustomed to given the heavy dependence in most sabermetric resources on […]
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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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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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A few weeks back I posted an entry about Diane Firstman’s imaginative baseball rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas on her Value Over Replacement Grit blog. Well, she’s at it again, this time deconstructing the classic poem “Casey at the Bat” to see how many times the scenario — home team down 4-2 with […]
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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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With the movie set to premiere this week, look for articles like these from various baseball/sabermetric/other sites re-examining the book to see if the principles are still valid. “Where does Moneyball stand now?” from BeyondtheBoxscore “For the Love of Moneyball: The Failure of Sabermetrics In the Absence of Necessary Resources,” from AthleticsNation “Your Field Guide To […]
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While doing research for my project, I came across this list, published in 2002, of the 100 top sports books of all time as chosen by the editors of Sports Illustrated. Of those 100, “only” 32 were about baseball. The nerve. Anyway, here’s the SI piece, trimmed to just baseball titles, with commentary from the […]
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Combining two themes here to bring you some recent podcasts. * Craig Robinson, author of the new Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure (See all Humor Books), was on the July 19 edition of Slate’s Hang Up and Listen. There are several excellent questions about Robinson’s though processes as he comes up with […]
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Good news for researchers: Baseball Prospectus will make all materials older than one year available to the public. For free! “It’s our way of saying thank you to the Internet for making our work possible over the years,” said Dave Pease, a partner at Baseball Prospectus in a statement. Very cool. One of the departments […]
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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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The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, March 18, at 4 p.m. Title Rank General Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, by John Thorn 1 The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First, by Jonah Keri […]
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The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Feb 25, at 1:30 p.m. Title Rank General Baseball Prospectus 2011 1 Baseball America 2011 Prospect Handbook: The 2011 Expert Guide to Baseball Prospects and MLB Organization Rankings 2 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis (Kindle version) 3 Moneyball: The […]
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but were afraid to ask. “WAR! Huh! Good God, y’all, what is it good for?” (Bet you didn’t know R&B singer Edwin Starr was a stat-head.)
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The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Feb 25, at 1:30 p.m. Title Rank General Baseball Prospectus 2011 1 Baseball America 2011 Prospect Handbook: The 2011 Expert Guide to Baseball Prospects and MLB Organization Rankings 2 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis (Kindle version) 3 The Last […]
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The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Feb 18, at 3:30 p.m. Title Rank General Baseball Prospectus 2011 1 Baseball America 2011 Prospect Handbook: The 2011 Expert Guide to Baseball Prospects and MLB Organization Rankings (Baseball America Prospect Handbook) 2 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis (Kindle […]
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The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Feb 4, at 10 a.m. Title Rank General Baseball Prospectus 2011 1 Baseball America 2011 Prospect Handbook: The 2011 Expert Guide to Baseball Prospects and MLB Organization Rankings (Baseball America Prospect Handbook) 2 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis (Kindle […]
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I quite enjoyed Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) and the follow-up, SuperFreakonomics. Not that I’m great at economics, but I love the analysis stuff. So it was kind of a “eureka moment” when I discovered Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won, by […]
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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
Bookshelf review: Lindy’s Sports Baseball 2011 Preview
February 24, 2011
I originally had not planned to buy this one, but on my next appearance on the What’s on Second Internet radio program (shameless self-promotion), I’ll be discussing the annual publications, so that’s how I justified the purchase. Actually, it’s better than I first thought. Although it’s light on features, the team profiles more than make […]
Tagged as: annual baseball publications
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