Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Kids, ask your grandparents. Sadly, my sister-in-law, Ruth, passed away unexpectedly a few weeks ago. My wife visited her partner and came back with some family mementos including an old transistor radio like this. It reminded me that this was the way many young people listened to games at night when they were supposed to […]
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I was doing one of my occasional office clean-ups yesterday when I came across a DVD of the Yankee Fantasy Camp I attended in 2009 as an embedded journalist when I was with the New Jersey Jewish News in 2009 — back when I had hair! The reason it was “newsworthy” was because it was the […]
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I have a review of Peter Gammons’ new book coming out on Bookreporter.com tomorrow (at least that’s the plan), so I thought I’d post about his musical career for a change via this video from 2023.
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It’s hard to find any description of modern pitchers as “throwbacks.” No one is throwing 300 innings any more. No one is tossing 20 complete games in a single season. Heck, no league is compiling that many in a season. So when I came across this video by accident, it made me nostalgic for the […]
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So right now I’m reading Peter Gammons’ new book, It’s All About the Players: What I’ve Learned from Baseball’s Best, for a review for Bookreporter.com, which of course led me down another rabbit hole. Gammons is one of those special writers — I’m thinking here of Thomas Boswell, Tom Verducci, Roger Angell, and the like […]
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I was flipping through the dial yesterday and came across Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite Matt Damon movies. There’s a famous scene (famous to me, anyway), in which Will, an unassuming genius, is in a session with his therapist Sean, played by Robin Williams, and the subject of regrets comes up. What Sean didn’t […]
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I was looking for a goofy British TV segment called “NumberWang” and of course fell down that ol’ Youtube rabbit hole. BTW, “Julie from Summerset” if the renown actor, Olivia Coleman! Not sure if her opponent is similarly famous. So I went through my Youtube history — which is considerable — and one of the […]
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A while back I did a review of Death by Data, which include a “requiem” for the old-fashioned baseball scout. I went looking for a very specific scene from The Stratton Story in which a bird-dog scout player by Frank “The Wizard” Morgan discovers the titular pitcher. I failed in that search, but I did come across […]
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If you wanted to describe my main interests with a Venn diagram, there would be one circle for movies and one for baseball, so the intersection would be baseball movies. Add a sliver of one of my favorite authors, Joe Posnanski, and you come up with this series of his blog posts counting down his […]
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I wrote about this back in 2018 but when I heard “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” on the radio yesterday, it reminded how much I was bothered by one particular verse. The classic Chuck Berry song has been recorded by numerous artists over the years including Buddy Holly, Wanda Jackson, and Sir Paul McCartney. Now I wouldn’t […]
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I usually don’t get political here (I used to have another blog for that outlet; I really should get back to that one), but yesterday, during the Fauci hearings “Senator Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, demanded to know, using an expletive, who Dr. Fauci thought he was for doing what he did.” That expletive was […]
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From July 2020 titled “Such stuff as dreams are made on.” With apologies to Shakespeare. I received this link from a high school classmate today about a treasure trove of baseball cards found in the attic of a recently deceased 97-year-old. (Thanks, Terry!) I have fantasies about some friend or colleague telling me a loved […]
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A few weeks ago a young colleague of mine happened to be singing a song that was part of a Walt Disney exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. I told her I was there and she was amazed. I thought I still had the official guidebook for the event, but it turns […]
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Lately I’ve been collecting the baseball preview issues of Sports Illustrated. As you can imagine, some are more expensive than others. I have an upper limit on how much I’ll spend but I’ve been happy with the results. The latest arrivals include 1957, 1958, 1965, 1968, and 1970. Aside from the wonderful writing and the […]
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A relatively recent throwback. Last week I asked the question… What is this? Joe DiMaggio Campanella Brooklyn’s got a winning team Mickey Mantle California baseball No one got the right answer which is: These baseball references are in the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” (You might even want to include “Marilyn […]
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A day late. Oopsie. If I had been on time, it would have marked the tenth anniversary of “one of the greatest moments in the history of baseball,” according to Mets announcer Gary Cohen. Colon published his memoirs, Big Sexy: In His Own Words, in 2020, two years after he retired at the age of 45. […]
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Wasn’t expecting to have more to say about Vermont baseball following Tuesday’s post but… We discovered a library on the Smugglers Notch premises, the type where guests “borrow” books and leave behind those they have finished while vacationing, rather than schlep them back home. I had read […]
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Mr. Baseball, a 1992 comedy starring Tom Selleck, was on recently so of course I watched it, even though I must have seen this “fish-out-of-water” film dozens of times. Similar to the saying about the game itself, whenever you watch, there’s always a chance that you’ll see something you never did before. And it’s true. […]
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Kind of nostalgic, especially since I tested positive for COVID earlier this month. But I’m feeling much better now. The Pandemic Baseball Book Club was a way for authors to promote their books in a period where making the usual rounds to bookstores and other author events was verboten. I wrote a regular roundup of […]
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Since we’re in the Passover season, I thought this piece from 2019 would be appropriate. Click here for more information about the book.
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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 blog 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
