Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Thanks to the NY Times’ Freakonomics blog, I came across FlipFlopFlyball, an off-shoot of flipflopflyin.com, which offers some unusual charts regarding the national pastime. In one, we see just how many Native Americans actually live in Cleveland (which gave me a few ideas for future charts)*, an unusual representation of when teams broke the color line, […]
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This week in baseball books, featuring the best-sellers according to Amazon.com on Friday, June 19. Title Rank General Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, Tye 1 The Yankee Years, Torre and Verducci 2 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Lewis 3 The Science of Hitting, Williams 4 As They See […]
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This week in baseball books, featuring the best-sellers according to Amazon.com on Friday, June 19. Title Rank General The Yankee Years, Torre and Verducci 1 As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires, Weber 2 Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, Tye 3 Moneyball: The Art of Winning […]
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One of the things I liked most about working for STATS Inc. was going to the ballpark, having a seat waiting for me in the press box, and being treated (almost) like any veteran member of the media. That included perks such as all matter of printed material, including media guides. For those who may […]
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Most of the annual previews are available as of this writing. I previously analyzed Beckett’s; here a more comprehensive look at the four I’ve purchased to date. Back in the day, the publisher printed only one cover. Now it’s easy to make one for every team or region. The examples here are for the New […]
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Beckett offers a very straightforward product. Aside from the team-by-team analysis, the only additional articles deal with the top ten free agent signings (Mark Teixeira leads the list) and ten worst off-season moves, which includes bad trades and poor acquisitions (Nick Swisher’s departure from the White Sox heads this one). There’s also a small 2008 […]
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From those great folks at TheBaseballAnalysts, part one of a multi-part deconstruction of the James’ essential.
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Joe Posnanski’s great column on SI.com about which statistics are the best indicators of baseball talent reminded me that I was going to do a review of the 2009 Bill James Handbook. I must admit, I don’t make a habit of reading books of this type. I always enjoyed the Total Baseball books or the […]
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Wowio is actually an e-book website that recently started charging for its collection. But if you don’t mind staring at your computer screen, you can read the the 2008 edition of the excellent Hardball Times for free. IMHO, this publication is right on par with the Baseball Prospectus annuals. Registration may be required.
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One of my favorite blogs is Freakonomics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt on The New York Times‘ Web site. So imagine my glee when I found several baseball-related items, treated with the hosts’ usual thought-provoking and humorous style: Since the beginning of 2008, the columns include: Baseball Writers Are A Rare Breed: […]
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For my recent birthday, my daughter bought me the Baseball ScoreCast from a local Brookstone. It’s kind of cool. A small gray digital device that keeps track of every game in real time (well, perhaps not real real time; there can be a lag time of several minutes, depending on satellite reception. The ScoreCast also […]
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In his May 8 column, Carl Bialik, aka, The Numbers Guy, offers “a reading list of articles about sports numbers, from the true distance of legendary home runs to a formula for measuring the chance of a basketball comeback.” The baseball portion of the piece includes: 565: The number of feet Mickey Mantle’s home run […]
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Eric Seidman, a senior at Penn State, has written Bridging the Statistical Gap, which “takes readers inside the sport’s box scores and stat sheets,” according to this article in the university’s Daily Collegian Online. The book is expected to be released in May. Some topics include: Great Batting Average Debate: What batting average does and […]
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If the reviewer had trouble with this, wait ’til he gets a hold of Derek Gentile’sBaseball’s Best 1,000. Imagine being that final player who made the cut. He can still say he was considered better than the other 19,000 or so players who qualified under Gentile’s guidelines. I’ll be doing a review of this one […]
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for FREE at the Sporting News‘ website. Will this staple of statistics fans for generations be available next year? That’s a good question, since American City Business Journals — Street and Smith’s parent company — took over “The Bible of baseball” recently. Stay tuned.
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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
* An Overviews of Annuals
July 18, 2009
Been meaning to do this since the beginning of the season. The best laid plans, and all that. Anyway, the missus has been complaining that she keeps tripping over these (mostly) thick volumes, so here goes. The volumes share a theme: analyzing the previous year. For some, however, this is only done as a predictor […]
Tagged as: baseball annuals
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