Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf

If you wanted to describe my main interests with a Venn diagram, there would be one circle for movies and one for baseball, so the intersection would be baseball movies. Add a sliver of one of my favorite authors, Joe Posnanski, and you come up with this series of his blog posts counting down his […]

ESPN used to have a simulcast for its Sunday Night Baseball that was full of data, and not your grandad’s batting average, ERA, or even OBP. These were the new generation of stats: launch angle, bat speed, pitch revolution, et al ad nauseam. All the numbers you could possibly want, but was it too much 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 […]

I wrote about this back in 2018 but when I heard “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” on the radio yesterday, it reminded how much I was bothered by one particular verse. The classic Chuck Berry song has been recorded by numerous artists over the years including Buddy Holly, Wanda Jackson, and Sir Paul McCartney. Now I wouldn’t […]

History is Now Magazine posted this piece about “George Rawlings and the Glove That Helped Change Baseball.” Thankfully, the author didn’t use my bugaboo word, “forever,” in the title. If you’re a subscriber to The Wall Street Journal, you will be able to read their review of Integration at Second Base: Jackie Robinson and the Quest […]