Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
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April 15 is “Jackie Robinson Day,” marking the anniversary of his debut in 1947. In honor of the occasion, every player wears his number, 42, causing no little bit of confusion for broadcasters, especially when you consider how defensive shifts move infielders out of their normal positions. Robinson’s number is the only one retired from […]
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Ken Burns was on the show yesterday to discuss his upcoming documentary on Jackie Robinson, to be aired next month on PBS. If they’d just done this a few days earlier, it would have been a perfect feature for Black History Month. But I can also understand that you don’t want to publicize something […]
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It’s widely agreed that baseball movies as a rule don’t do well either at the box office or with critics. Sure there are exceptions — Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, and the original Bad News Bears immediately come to mind. But by and large, meh. Case in point: I recently watched a MLB Network presentation […]
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Sorry, couldn’t come up with an appropriate theme. Last week I linked to the first week in Tom Hoffarth’s annual 30-books-in-30-days feature. Catching up: Day 8: Bats, Balls, and Hollywood Stars: Hollywood’s Love Affair with Baseball, by Joe Siegman Day 9: A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball,by Jennifer Ring Day […]
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* Josh Wilker’s forthcoming book, Benchwarmer: An Anxious Dad’s Almanac of Fatherhood and Other Failures gets a thumbs up from Kirkus. Upshot: “This almanac of fatherhood (and other failures) is honest, relatable and humorous—an indispensable read for fathers (and sons) whose joy in life comes not from winning the big game but being alive to […]
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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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Didn’t want the day to go by without a mention of Martin Luther King Jr. and his baseball connections. Here’s a piece I posted on the last MLK Day. One from two years ago by The Baseball Sociologist. And another from 2008 by the popular and thoughtful Dave Zirin on King and Roberto Clemente in […]
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The next Moneyball? * A few “inside baseball (business)” pieces coming up: In Pursuit of Pennants: Baseball Operations from Deadball to Moneyball by long-time SABR members Mark Armour and Daniel Leviit. John Pessah adds to this sub-genre with The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball’s Power Brokers. Lonnie Wheeler’s Intangiball: The Subtle […]
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Happy New Year, everyone. Hope nothing but the best comes your way in 2015, including the best baseball books available. Almost done with the non-baseball book and greatly looking forward to catching up on my regular reading, writing, and wrangling authors, filmmakers, and artists into discussing their work on new podcast segments. In the meantime, […]
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From the editors of Spitball Magazine, here are the finalists for the 2014 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year: Brooks: The Biography of Brooks Robinson, by Doug Wilson The Chalmers Race: Ty Cobb, Napoleon Lajoie, and the Controversial 1910 Batting Title that Became a National Obsession, by Rick Huhn The Fight of […]
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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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Usually when I do these things, there are several titles for consideration. But in this case, there are enough to give Roger Kahn’s latest title its own entry, although very few to date have appeared in mainstream publications. I’m adding my thoughts on some of the reviews, but you will make your of judgments. Here’s […]
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Publishers Weekly came out with their fall preview issue. Not exactly sure how this works, but there are two lists, One is included in this overview by Jonathan Segura. The other makes note of 18 purported baseball titles. I say “purported” because the uncredited piece includes 50 Greatest Players in New York Giants Football History. […]
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The author of this Huffington Post piece makes a compelling argument. Most latter-day fans of Kahn know him from his nostalgic look at The Boys of Summer, which — hard to believe — was published more than 40 years ago. But he was also a beat writer for those Brooklyn Dodgers, as well as a […]
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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
Opinions vary
March 2, 2016
Graham Womack published this ranked list of the 25 greatest baseball books on The Sporting News site. When I wrote 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die, I made a decision not to put them in an order other than alphabetical to avoid having to defend my choices. Such a method invites arguments […]
Tagged as: Babe Ruth, Baseball Cards, Baseball Hall of Fame, baseball history, baseball statistics, Bill James, Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodgers, Bucl O'Neil, David Halberstam, Jackie Robinson, Jo DiMaggio, John Thorn, Mickey Mantle, Negro Leagues, New YorkYankees, Roger Angell, Roger Kahn, Sportswriters
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