Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
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A blog for news, reviews, previews, and interviews about baseball lit and other items of pop culture interest. Bringing news about baseball publications and other media to a discerning audience.
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
1d ago
A reminder: 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 posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes (see my piece on “Why Amazon’s search engine sucks“). In addition, occasionally ..read more
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
2d ago
Take two. Don’t know what happened, but the original post from earlier this week disappeared like a Doc Gooden curveball. Not even a draft of it, so I’m trying to recreate it as faithfully as possible. It seems to many outside the area that New Yorkers have an inflated image of themselves (at least those ..read more
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
3d ago
It’s funny, isn’t it, the things that change our lives? Novelist Paul Auster, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 77, may have owed his career to baseball. From The Guardian: The author was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. According to Auster, his writing life began at the age of eight ..read more
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
3d ago
Passover is over. Inevitably, we buy too many boxes of matzo and the question then becomes, what do you do with the leftovers? Sure, you can eat this stuff all year round, but would you really want to? I suppose I could ship it off to Alex Bregman… ..read more
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
4d ago
East Side, West Side, New Yorkers have an overlarge image of themselves (at least in Manhattan). Everything has to be the best: Bigger, faster, most glitzy. Perhaps that’s why a lot of people outside the Big Apple dislike them so much. But there’s no denying the National Pastime has its roots deep into there, as ..read more
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
1w ago
So is this a new trend in book publishing? When Ken Holtzman passed away last week, I noted that a book had been published about him immediately after he died. Recently, long-time Yankee announcer John Sterling announced his retirement. Since it’s not unusual for a team broadcaster to published his memoirs, I went to Amazon ..read more
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
2w ago
A reminder: 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 posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes (see my piece on “Why Amazon’s search engine sucks“). In addition, occasionally ..read more
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
2w ago
Wow, it’s been a rough few days. First Fritz Peterson, now a trio of notables, for different reasons. Carl Erskine, the last of “the boys of summer,” died Tuesday at the age of 97. “Oisk” was a mainstay of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ rotation, going 20-6 in 1953. Surprisingly, he was only named to the All-Star ..read more
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
2w ago
I’ve may have mentioned a project I’m working on: collecting obituaries of ballplayers that have appeared in The New York Times with the notion of how a player is identified in the opening lines. Here’s what Bruce Weber had to say in today’s edition, which had a “refer” on the front page. Fritz Peterson, who ..read more
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
3w ago
A reminder: 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 posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes (see my piece on “Why Amazon’s search engine sucks“). In addition, occasionally ..read more