Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
From the NY Daily News, this article about the demise of Paperbacks Plus, the last independent bookstore in the Bronx. …every Yankee baseball player-cum-author has held a book signing at Paperbacks Plus, including Yogi Berra, Paul O’Neill and Derek Jeter. “Every Yankee player who’s ever come through here has been super nice to everyone, especially […]
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This duet of mini-reviews includes: Benchclearing: Baseball’s Greatest Fights and Riots, by Spike Vrusho The Worst of Sports: Chumps, Cheats, and Chokers from the Games We Love, by Jesse Lamovsky, Matthew Rosetti and Charlie Demarco Detect a theme here?
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A blast from the past courtesy of the Lansing State Journal. Upshot: …[O]ne book is not responsible for the seismic shift in sports media during the past 40 years, or even the past five years. But it’s part of it, and Bouton’s book is among the first insights that the game, the strategy and the […]
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Pat Jordan, who wrote about the difficulties of trying to interview Jose Canseco on Deadspin.com, does it again for Slate.com, this time with Josh Beckett, who declined the honor of a New York Times’ profile. This has become the curse of modern sports journalism. Writers and fans alike no longer get to know the object […]
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According to this op-ed piece in the May 25 New York Times, in which the writer claims booing the home town team is among the most traitorous of behaviors imaginable.
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As reviewed on Stltoday.com, a St. Louis-based web site. The End of Baseball is a Bill Veeck-inspired historical fiction, which is on my shelf for near-future reading. Upshot: Mainly, as somebody in baseball puts it, “The End of Baseball” sails straight down central. As somebody else in baseball used to say, it’s a winner.
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The recent release of the Indiana Jones movie allows for the tangential connection with Haunted Baseball: Ghosts, Curses, Legends and Eerie Events, wherein coauthor Mickey Bradley is interviewed for this piece in Newsday.
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This AP piece in the Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald reminds us that Torre is still coming out with a book next year.
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From Fredericksburg.com/The Free Lance-Star, this piece opines that the recent success of the Red Sox has meant the death of those books that complain (whine?) about the decades of disappointment suffered by the franchise’s fans.Upshot: The book is composed of numerous interviews by columnist David Laurila with assorted players, former players, coaches and personalities associated […]
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John Feinstein’s latest — an in-depth look at the 2007 season of Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina — gets the treatment from the Christian Science Monitor. Upshot: Feinstein achieves a double play fans should savor for its scrupulous look at what life is like for the 21st-century major leaguer.
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From the Johnstown, Pa. Tribune Democrat, this review of the aforementioned book by Bernstein. Upshot: The problem is, Ross Bernstein’s [book] has more holes in it than Mario Mendoza’s swing. Ouch.
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From The Hardball Times Website, this evaluation. Upshot: In general, Rosengren does a good job telling these tales, and the book makes a nice, light read. If reading about the above sounds interesting to you, check it out.
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(May 19): Feature story on Elijah Dukes, the Washington Nationals’ “troubled” star Column by Tim Keown on the latest in the continuing soap opera that is Roger Clemens 8 Things to Know About Groundskeepers And the usual from MLB Insider (May 12): Ben Reiter profile of Max Scherzer, rookie pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks (May […]
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This piece from the Christian Science Monitor continues the theme put forth by Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends. (So is this going to forever plague the reader when it comes to the autobio/memoir genre?)
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I culled this entry from an article on Sportingnews.com about “The Biggest Liars in Sports History”: 9. JOE MORGAN Joe’s Truth: ESPN’s top baseball talking head gave us some baseball history when he beat Philadelphia with a RBI single in his 1964 Major League Baseball debut. His hit (he told us) extended the Colt 45’s […]
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The Columbus Dispatch ran this review of Everything They Had: Sportswriting from David Halberstam. The LA Times published one, too. Regardless of their politics, I’ve always had great admiration for authors like Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and George F. Will, among others, who have the ability to write about “serious” issues and those of lesser […]
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From the Lost and Gone Forever blog: (Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the episode in question “Something Nice Back Home”, avert thine eyes). By virtue of the Yankees/Red Sox and Indians/Mariners scores in the newspaper article, only one date is viable for the publication of the paper: August 31, 2007. Article states Yankees finish […]
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Alex Belth appends his theme of essential baseball books, with lists from Richard Sandomir, The New York Times‘ sports media columnist and Roger Kahn, along with a slew of comments.
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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
* Will Leech, er Leitch in the Times
May 26, 2008
Funny how the editor of Deadspin.com has such disdain against traditional journalism except when he seems to benefit from it. Case in point, his article on the Chicago Cubs in the New York Times‘ “Play” supplement. On the other hand, is the newspaper just as “guilty” of providing the forum? I’m just askin’…
Tagged as: Chicago Cubs, Deadspin, New York Times
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