Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Voting franchise, that is. From the Baseball Hall of Fame: Frick Award Ballot Voting Begins Online Tomorrow — Fan Vote Will Place Three Names on Final Ballot — Thousands of baseball fans have already used Facebook to stay connected to their heroes at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Now, they can nominate […]
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Umpires have beengetting a lot of bad press lately, and deservedly so. Sports pundits are calling for wider use of instant replay in an effort to make the right calls, primarily on fair and foul balls and other on-base issues. One area they pretty much agree should not be touched is balls and strikes. Sure, […]
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This week in baseball books, featuring the best-sellers according to Amazon.com on Friday, October 9. Title Rank General The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, by Joe Posnanski 1 Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s […]
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This week in baseball books, featuring the best-sellers according to Amazon.com on Friday, October 2. Title Rank General The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, by Joe Posnanski 1 Sixty Feet, Six Inches: A Hall of Fame Pitcher & a Hall of […]
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This week in baseball books, featuring the best-sellers according to Amazon.com on Friday, September 25. Title Rank General The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, by Joe Posnanski 1 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis 2 Game […]
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This week in baseball books, featuring the best-sellers according to Amazon.com on Friday, September 11. Title Rank General The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, Posnanski 1 Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Games, Lewis 2 The Yankee Years, Torre and […]
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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 […]
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Apropos to the previous entry, we might have a Rob Neyer moment here. In the snippet, Redford claims to have been in New York where he attended a Yankees-Red Sox game. He mentions that Maris and Mantle were in the lineup, but not Williams. He doesn’t give a date, but it had to have been […]
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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 […]
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Reading Barra’s Berra bio and came across mention of Yogi and several teammates appearing on an episode of Sgt. Bilko, starring Phil Silvers. Here’s a synposis from IMDB.com Bilko’s Company B gets beaten at Baseball by the WACs and with a big game against Ritzik and Grover coming up he is in dire need of […]
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Another piece of trivia: Phil Rizzuot was a guest on the premier of the popular TV game show, What’s My Line? (Feb. 2, 1950). I was tickled by the formality between the host and the panelists. Compare that with today’s beauts like Deal or No Deal.
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Eastbound & Down, an new comedy series from HBO, tells the sad tale of Kenny Powers, a dynamic relief pitcher (originally on the Atlanta Braves) who loses his fastball but never his attitude: rude, crude, and lewd. When the pros no longer have any use for him, he returns to his home town where he […]
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PBS recently announced that it will air The Tenth Inning, the new Ken Burns documentary on baseball, in the spring of 2010. The special will coincide with a re-broadcast of the original nine-part documentary, which debuted in 1994 and was seen by more than 48 million viewers. The Tenth Inning follows baseball’s trajectory from 1993 […]
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Until I get the Roberts’ book, I’m not going to spend a lot of time deconstructing the Rodriguez debacle. But since I enjoy finding baseball-related items from non-baseball sources, here are two pieces from The New York Times: “As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes,” Noam Cohen’s “Link-by-Link” column in Monday’s Business section. “The way Mr. […]
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Sounds like the title of one of his many TV shows. Anyways, the elfin sportscaster will be leaving HBO to plight his trough with the new MLB Network. According to the press release from MNLN, Costas “will host special original programming with an emphasis on the game’s history and its most significant figures and topics, […]
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I know we’ve only just begun, but you know me: I have no filter. The first day of MLB Network was pretty much a disappointment, as far as I’m concerned. The opening hour-long show, featuring four talking heads (including Harold Reynolds, Al Leiter, and Barry Larkin) alternated with a replay of Don Larsen’s World Series […]
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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
* As Steve Martin used to say…
November 5, 2009
“But the most amazing thing of all: I get paid for doing this” (the closing lines for one of the comedian’s songs during his heyday in the late 1970s). I bring it up because, once again, it goes to the folly of using sports pundits as a source of reliable information. At least when it […]
Tagged as: ESPN, New York Yankees, Phildelphia Phillies, tleevision, Tony Kornheiser, World Series
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