Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the debut of one of my favorite TV shows of all time: Lost. The iconic program earned extra credit for me by including baseball in its canon: And here: Happy anniversary, Lost! Update: It appears, once again, my math is off. I was basing this entry on a […]
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Can you believe it’s been almost 30 years since the NY Mets won their last championship? That’s a generation. Not that I’m complaining. Could be worse (see, Chicago Cubs). But anniversaries are great for books and movies, so Heather Quinlan is taking up the challenge for ’86 Mets: The Movie. As you can tell from […]
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Note: Just like Chuck Lorre’s “vanity cards” at the end of The Big Bang Theory, you should read these list stories to their conclusion; the end is always changing, even though the theme is basically the same, finishing up with a self-promotional message. On with the show… Here are the top ten baseball books as […]
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There’s something inherently unfair about lumping together post-season records. Prior to 1969, there were just two teams still active after the regular 162 slate of games. Then there were an additional four. An additional round was added in 1995, and, in 2012, an additional game for the Wild Card play-in. So the if all the […]
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First of all, congratulations to Linda P. of Lindenhurst, IL, winner of last week’s book, Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76, by Dan Epstein. Thank you all for your comments. This week’s offering is the brand-spankin’ new Down to the Last Pitch: How the 1991 Minnesota Twins and Atlanta […]
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The top-ten baseball books as per Amazon.com. Caveat 1: Print editions only (at least for now); I’m old fashioned that way. Caveat 2: Since the rankings are updated every hour, these lists might not longer be 100 percent accurate by the time you read it. But it’ll be close enough for government work. Caveat 3: […]
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All of these came in this week from my “alma mater,” the University of Nebraska Press. So many books, so little time.
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This it the time of year when the baseball media offer their considered opinions on their favorite prospects. Sometimes they’re spot on, other times, not so much. So I thought, why not apply this to the upcoming “rookie crop” of baseball books? That is, titles that are making their debuts in 2014 — no reprints/reissues […]
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Yes, if you subscribe for an eight-week subscription to the digital version of the paper, you can receive a copy of For Boston: From Worst to First, the Improbable Dream Season of the 2013 Red Sox . After the introductory period, the price bumps up to $3.99/week. You cancel at any time but you have […]
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Or, in the case, the podcast did. Both of these items relate to the recent World Series. An offshoot of the “National Pastime Radio” tag, this was heard in the “Who’s Carl This Time” segment of on the Nov. 2 episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me: PETER SAGAL: All right, Gary, here is your […]
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I’m grateful for this piece in today’s New York Times by Richard Sandomir critiquing the network’s handling of the last game of the World Series. A main point is the use made popular in the last few years of the baseball version of the “sideline reporter,” only much less serious. In football, a SR will […]
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Well, that was relatively easy. The Boston Red Sox are your new World Series Champions! As a newspaper buff, I always like to see how the local press covers such high-profile sports events. Frequently, tabloid publications employ “wraps,” using the entire front and back page for one large photo, like these from the Boston Herald. […]
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XX Because this is an ongoing concern and I can’t be bothered to remember how many of these I’ve done before. You know how many baseball “experts” picked a World Series in which the Boston Red Sox faced the St. Louis Cardinals? According to PunditTracker, zero. Where do I apply for a job in the […]
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Brought to you by the folks at Mental Floss, the magazine that gave me my first national exposure and cover story (right). Have these World Series matchups ever happened? (Not to brag but I aced it.) The Baseball Card Brand Quiz (a lot tougher; ugh, I only scored 64%, which was slightly higher than the […]
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In The Baseball Uncyclopedia: A Highly Opinionated, Myth-Busting Guide to the Great American Game, authors Michael Kun and Howard Bloom write about the state of baseball literature.According to their calculations, there are: Books about the Yankees. Books about the Red Sox. Books about the Yankees and the Redd Sox. Books about players who played for […]
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Anyone who’s read my blogs for awhile knows I’m all about the veterans. So it was especially please to have them honored before last night’s World Series game. The triple-amputee Marine acquitted himself most nobly in throwing out the first pitch (about the 7:30 mark).
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Tonight’s World Series game will honor America’s veterans. The New York Times ran this piece about Lou Brissie, who managed to have a brief Major League career despite being grievously injured in world war II. He was the subject of the 2009 biography The Corporal Was a Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie, by former […]
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(Kids, ask your grandparents…) So I’m watching the game last night and Detroit reliever Al Albuquerque is pitching to San Francisco first baseman Brandon Belt. So I got to wondering: how often to batters and pitchers with alliterative names face each other? I just did a quick look at Baseball Reference and discovered there are […]
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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
Baseball best-sellers, Aug. 1
August 1, 2014
Note: Just like Chuck Lorre’s “vanity cards” at the end of The Big Bang Theory, you should read these list stories to their conclusion; the end is always changing, even though the theme is basically the same, finishing up with a self-promotional message. On with the show… Here are the top ten baseball books as […]
Tagged as: Baseball instruction, Bernard Malamud, Brooklyn Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, Doris Kearns Goodwin, George F. Will, Jason Kendall, Lee Judge, Mariano Rivera, Michael Feinstein, minor leagues, Moneyball, New York Yankees, Oakland As, Ted Williams, The Natural, Wrigley Field
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