Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
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I never got that. Without going into the popular history of friggatriskaidekaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th as opposed to triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number itself), isn’t 13 kind of a good number for the Jews? Bar mitzva and all? According to Baseball-Reference.com, there have been 299 players who wore the number 13 for part […]
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Or his daughters’, as he claims. “Ballhawk” Zack Hample has agreed to give the 3,000-hit ball to the Yankees’ DH. In the case of two wrongs not making a right, I was always in Rodriguez’s corner when it came to being paid for achieving milestones. No one held a gun to the Yankees when they […]
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I tuned into the Yankee game on Friday just as Alex Rodriguez was coming to bat, looking for his 3,000th hit. Timing is everything: ARod launched a home run for the milestone. It was the third time a player hit a home run for the magic number, including former teammate Derek Jeter. The difference is […]
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I’ve often wondered about the people who negotiate to retrieve home run balls for the players, so thank you, Billy Witz of the New York Times, for this fascinating piece about Yankees security guard/”collector” Eddie Fastook. How much leeway do you think Fastook has when negotiating for the piece of treasure? And if he considers […]
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I recently compared book excerpts with movie trailers. It’s my contention that the publications concentrate on the most salacious or controversial passages they can find because, let’s face it, people love the dirt. So when you see headlines such as “Jorge Posada bitter toward Yankees management in book,” or “Yankee great Jorge Posada still steamed […]
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Since I posted the first of these on a Thursday, which is known on social media as a time of reflection, I thought to make it a regular thing under this rubric. These are kind of fun; it’s like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re gonna get. (Actually, I never understood […]
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As in “What would (Brandon) Steiner do?” Pardon the Interruption has a regular feature in which the co-hosts discuss whether an event or story if “Something or nothing.” That’s the first thing that came to mind when I saw a front-page story in today’s New York Times titled “Alex Rodriguez’s Quest Is Going, Going … […]
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So now, after all this time and all the denials, Alex Rodriguez has “formally” apologized. And not through a statement read by his attorney or PR functionary, but in the form of a hand-written letter. (I wonder what soer of planning went into the decision to present the apology that way, rather than typed out. […]
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You ever have one of the experiences where a picture falls off a wall for no reason? Then you find out later that the person in the photo has had an accident or worse? This just happened as I was working on blog posts: The mini-bobblehead of Alex Rodriguez, then a member of the Texas […]
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I frequently wonder about the role of book critics: Must they be students of the topics of which they read and report? Fans? That’s certainly not the case in this piece by Mark Dent of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Dent writes – with my annotations in brackets — The “summer” baseball book could have its own […]
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As work on the new book about the Maccabiah Games becomes more urgent, I find I have less time to keep up with the latest baseball books news. Apologies. I guess the good part about the project is that it will be done before the time spring training — and the release of of new […]
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Among the other things I’ve neglected to post recently was the cornucopia of recent NPR programs featuring baseball, in one form or another. On All-Star Game Tuesday (July 15) Leonard Lopate interviewed Ken Griffey Sr., author of Big Red: Baseball, Fatherhood, and My Life in the Big Red Machine You can listen to that segment […]
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Have to rearrange the schedule a bit between last holiday weekend and next weekend’s vacation to California. So… 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, […]
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Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball’s Steroid Era, by Tim Elfrink and Gus Garcia-Roberts, is set to come out next Tuesday. Needless to say, it’s already getting some buzz. Unlike books by, say Joe Torre, Mariano Rivera, Mookie Wilson, or even Selena Roberts’ 2009 release, A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez, there’s […]
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The Baseball Project was the guest on the April 22 Soundcheck, performing three songs off their latest album, 3rd. Tracks on the new release include: Stat From Nails To Thumbtacks Hola America! 13 The Day Dock Went Hunting Heads To The Veterans Committee Monument Park Box Scores They Don’t Know Henry The Babe They Are […]
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It should come as no surprise that the ESPN The Magazine article about Ian Kinsler referred to earlier this week on my other blog, has generated some buzz. In the grand scale of things, it won’t matter, but for now, with a routinely dull spring training under way, with A-Rod out of the picture, the […]
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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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One of my favorite features in the old Street & Smith annuals was the list of statistical targets (The Sporting News now has that burden/honor). The contemporary players were listed along with the all-timers for major categories such as home runs, RBI, wins, strikeouts, etc. But many of those milestones don’t seem like that much […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
In my most recent "day job," I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted another blog. Busy, busy, busy.
I did a profile piece on the award-winning cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
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
Because you could put A-Rod’s 661st home run on your bookshelf
February 26, 2015
Because, let’s face it, its worth will be questionable. One of the things I loved about the old Street & Smith baseball annuals was the list of upcoming milestones that were within reach for current ballplayers. You could see, for example, that this guy was 22 home runs away from 500, or that guy was […]
Tagged as: Alex Rodriguez, baseball records, baseball statistics, New York Yankees, PED
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