Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf

The First All-Star Game: Babe Ruth, FDR and America at the Crossroads, by Randall Sullivan Tonight is the 96th Major League All-Star Game. (Or is it? More on that later.) I suppose I will watch out of habit. The first one I ever watched was the 1967 affair that saw the NL win 2-1 in 10 innings. All the runs came on solo homers. Very exciting for kid, seeing his baseball card heroes in action.…

Amazon keeps changing the way they report, so that will be mirrored here. Sometimes there will be rankings of Kindle and audio-books on baseball, other times, not. 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…

Not necessarily. Shohei Ohtani recently hit his 300th home run. It should come as no surprise that his baseball cards can be worth thousands of dollars. But he’s still “trapped” by the fairly standard design of American-made cards. That brought to mind this Bookshelf Conversation I did in 202 with Robert Fitts, the go-to guy when it comes to Japanese baseball, including his excellent volume, An…

Amazon keeps changing the way they report, so that will be mirrored here. Sometimes there will be rankings of Kindle and audio-books on baseball, other times, not. 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…

♦ From the HistoryisNow website: “Jack Norworth: The Songwriter Who Sent America to the Ballpark” ♦ Award-winning author Robert K. Fitts will talk about his new book, “In the Japanese Ballpark: Behind the Scenes of Nippon Professional Baseball,” on Saturday, July 11, from 2 to 4 p.m., at Nisei Veterans Hall, Gardena Valley Japanese Cultural Institute, 1964 W. 162nd St., Gardena, CA. ♦ Lucky…

I have a confession to make. When I was a young kid, I would swipe coins from my mother’s purse to feed my habit: buying baseball cards. At first it was just nickels for a wax pack of five cards and that gold ole flat stick of stale bubble gum. Then I got into the heavy stuff: the 25 cards wrapped in cellophane (sans gum) for a quarter. At one point it got so bad I would buy a box for $5. I was…

So here we are. Schools are closed. People are going on vacation. Time to relax and catch up on some reading, right? Trouble is, I approach reading like I’m still in college, trying to juggle several classes at once. Some are for general interest and pleasure, while others are more of an “assignment” as I try to figure out who to ask on as a guest for the Bookshelf Conversations. A small sampling…

Headnote: Last Week Tonight — one of my favorite shows — did a bit with newscasters ruminating about how quickly the year has gone by (unfortunately I can’t find a clip of that segment). That’s how I feel: July already?? Moving on (one of John Oliver’s signature lines)… ♦ ♦ ♦ Amazon keeps changing the way they report, so that will be mirrored here. Sometimes there will be rankings of Kindle and…

No, not Bugs Bunny this time. Remember the scene in The Natural in which the NY Knights hired a hypnotist (Doc Knobb) to try to get the team out of a prolonged slump? I wonder if Dr. David Tracy’s 1951 book, The Psychologist at Bat, served as the inspiration for the character in the film?

Steven Gietschier, a former archivist for The Sporting News (talk about a dream job for a baseball reader), is one of those people I had know for many years without ever having met. There were numerous e-mail exchanges and a few phone calls, but nothing face to face. I finally had that chance in 2023 at the Spitball Magazine Casey Awards where we were part of a small dinner hosted by Mike…

Amazon keeps changing the way they report, so that will be mirrored here. Sometimes there will be rankings of Kindle and audio-books on baseball, other times, not. 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…

A few weeks ago a young colleague of mine happened to be singing a song that was part of a Walt Disney exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. I told her I was there and she was amazed. I thought I still had the official guidebook for the event, but it turns out it was actually the edition published for Expo ’67, which took place in Montreal — my ancestral manse — that I have on my…

Short notice, but from Ballpark Digest: “If you’re planning a visit to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown this week, we’d recommend scheduling your visit for Thursday, June 18, when our Eric Vickrey kicks off the annual Hall of Fame Author Series to discuss Before They Wore Dodger Blue: Tommy Lasorda and the Greatest Draft Class in Baseball History.” A series of…

Amazon keeps changing the way they report, so that will be mirrored here. Sometimes there will be rankings of Kindle and audio-books on baseball, other times, not. 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…

Abbott: Strange as it may seem, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names. Costello: Funny Names? Abbott: Nicknames, nicknames. Now on the St. Louis team we have Who’s on first, What’s on second. I Don’t Know’s on third… They don’t ’em nicknames like that anymore. Oh, sure, Baseball-Reference.com might include a current player’s nom de guerre, but they don’t get the daily usage as say a…

Mazel tov to Phil Rosenzweig whose One Splendid Season: Baseball and America in 1912, Told with the Words and Images of the Hassan Triplefolder Set won SABR’s Larry Ritter Award which honors “the best book about baseball between 1901 and 1919 published during the previous calendar year.” You can read more about it from the SABR site. I had the pleasure of having Rosenzweig on for a Bookshelf…

Amazon keeps changing the way they report, so that will be mirrored here. Sometimes there will be rankings of Kindle and audio-books on baseball, other times, not. 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…