Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
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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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That Don Larsen threw his World Series perfect game. Holy cow, as Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto — who did not appear in that game — might say, they haven’t even finished the Division Series yet. Books about this singular event include: The Perfect Yankee: The Incredible Story of the Greatest Miracle in Baseball History, by […]
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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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(Kids, ask your parents/grandparents.) One of my pre-season amusements is to purchase baseball magazines and study their predictions, especially for who will get to the post-season. Somewhere on my other blog is an analysis of how they’ve done in seasons past. This year PunditTracker has done the work for me. The San Francisco Giants get […]
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Several new titles arrived over the past week including: Before the Curse: The Chicago Cubs’ Glory Years, 1870-1945, by Randy Roberts and Carson Cunningham A People’s History of Baseball, by Mitchell Nathanson Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick, by Paul Dickson (Of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary fame) The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball […]
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The Oct. 24 issue carried items about “Goats of Octobers Past,” Joe Sheehan on the Rangers; and Tom Verducci on the Series in general The Oct. 31 issue carried Verducci’s update on one of the most exciting Fall Classic in recent years ; a “sympathy note” to Red Sox Nation, and a sneak peek at […]
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At the risk of sounding jingoistic, if the Fall Classic doesn’t take place in New York, it posts a problem for local sports pages. How much should they be writing, and would their readers care that much. So you go looking for filler. In this case The New York Times published this cool piece last […]
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As I continue to do research for my own project, I get a kick when I find some old material that confirms I’m on the right track with some of my selections. Hey, it’s nice to find validation rom time to time, right? So today’s blast from the past is this brief appearance by the […]
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The Hall of Fame manager died today at the age of 82. UPDATE: Richard Goldstein’s obituary for Williams in today’s NY Times. Williams won back-to-back World Championships with the Oakland As in 1972-73. He also led the Boston Red Sox to their “Impossible Dream” pennant in 1967 in his first year as a manager at […]
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Last weekend’s interleague series between the Red Sox and Cubs was the impetus for this New York Times story that “reveals” the idea of throwing a World Series did not originate with the Black Sox of 1919, but the year before when Boston and Chicago last faced each other at Fenway Park. The Times’ piece […]
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Go, Giants! They get the cover story treatment from Tom Verducci (Giant Moment). But that’s it for awhile, I fear.
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One of these days, some enterprising person is going to go back to all those historic baseball games and write about the secondary events that helped pave the way for a Kirk Gibson, a Joe Carter, or a Bill Mazeroski to become part of the lore of the national pastime. But don’t forget the Hal […]
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Both the topics and the release dates of these books could be considered appropriate here. The first looks at Frank Deford’s The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball, while the second considers Mike Vacarro’s The First Fall Classic.
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See how well you can do on this Mental Floss quiz about the 1988 film version of Eliot Asinof’s classic about the 1919 Black Sox. I had a perfect score; I’m just sayin’.
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Baseball takes center stage for perhaps the last time in 2009. Derek Jeter makes an appropriate cover boy for Tom Verducci’s World Series story. This makes the 11th time Jeter has appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Four of those have come for the post-season, including three World Series covers. Here’s a link to […]
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Kudos for the Star-Ledger and their sidebar for separating World Series records from the rest of the post-season pack. Derek Jeter now has 50 hits in the World Series, which moves him into fifth place. Andy Pettitte has five wins, good for forth place with a bunch of others. I bring this up because there […]
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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
