Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
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Recently received a copy of On This Day in Baseball History: a Day-By-Day Account of Baseball’s Most Indelible Moments, by something called the “Baseball Time Machine.” This gave me an idea for some more content for the blog. (Years ago I used to do “Happy Birthday” entries for players with books by or about them. […]
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Note: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish writing one). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes. In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one […]
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A column contributed by Ryan Tyler When it comes to the greatest baseball photos, our attention is often focused on what’s in the image. We tend to scrutinize every detail, like who’s pitching, who’s batting, who’s running after the ball, the emotions of the players, the audience, and so forth. But when you look at […]
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As you may have notice, these entries have been falling off in the last several weeks. My apologies. A new full-time job — very different from what I had been doing as the sports and features editor of a weekly community newspaper in suburban New Jersey — has put new and strange demands on my […]
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Brought to you by the good folks at Pinstripe Alley. The entry includes such titles as Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, by Richard Ben Cramer The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, by Buster Olney The Yankee Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter, by Ian O’Connor All […]
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Lisa Iannucci at The GetMoreSports site included four baseball titles among her “Anticipated Sports Books of 2016.” Is it picayune to note that “anticipated” does not mean “looked forward to,” but merely “expected?” Anyway, the titles include (with the writer’s commentary): DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers by Tony Castro is due out […]
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Frank Sinatra would have turned 100 tomorrow. He had his fair share of baseball chops. He starred with Gene Kelly in the 1949 feature Take Me Out to the Ball Game in which he played second baseman Dennis Ryan of the famed “O’Brien to Ryan to Goldberg” ditty. Might not have been the greatest baseball […]
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Saw this on a Google alert; I don’t read the NY Post so I can avoid stories like this one by Richard Johnson in the Page Six column: “Botched surgery made Joe DiMaggio impotent” Yankee icon Joe DiMaggio never got over his heartbreaking marriage to Marilyn Monroe — partly because he was emasculated by a […]
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NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on […]
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Strangers in the Bronx: DiMaggio, Mantle, and the Changing of the Yankee Guard by Andrew O’Toole. Triumph 304 Pages, $25.95 There has been a lot written about the “changing of the guard” when it came to the Commerce Comet replacing the Yankee Clipper, but nothing that approaches the overall depth of this bittersweet tale by […]
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Veteran sports journalist Phil Pepe wants you to know his newest book is not a memoir. His philosophy is that most people don’t care about the writer, how he got his job, the day-to-day doings of the craft. I disagree, but that’s just me. Pepe, who recently turned 80, has been covering baseball since the […]
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Rather than lay it all out there, I thought I would divvy this up into smaller, more manageable bites, so here’s Part 2. * denotes items of particular interest (to me, at any rate). History One of my bugaboos has long been titles such as The Nats and the Grays: How Baseball in the Nation’s […]
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Congratulations to Tim. N. of Fair Oaks,Calif., winner of the tenth anniversary edition of The Last Best League, by Jim Collins. Next up: Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love by C. David Heymann. Here’s my review from Bookreporter.com. A couple of things I neglected to mention in the piece: Notice the cover. The photo conveys […]
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My take on the recent “biography” by the late C. David Heymann, via Bookreporter.com.
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As Douglas MacArthur once said, “I have returned.” Visiting the San Francisco area for vacation was relaxing, apart from driving on California 1… Fortunately, we were going north, so oncoming traffic was on the left and inland was on the right. If we had been going south it would have been oncoming on the left […]
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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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(Speaking of “nations,” in looking for an appropriate clip for this piece, I sought out the theme for the news segment of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, a precursor to Saturday Night Live‘s “Weekend Update.” I was reminded what a big deal RML-I was in its time. Some of the guests included such high-profilers as John […]
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Rob Neyer over at Baseball Nation posted this entry about this version of a Woody Guthrie song about Joe DiMaggio and his hitting streak. Houndmouth covers Billy Bragg & Wilco Sorry, and with all due respect to Mr. Neyer, but I much prefer the peppier Wilco version; the other one sounds too much like a […]
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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
