Is it just me, or does that seem like a redundancy? Anyway three all-time favorites are on this list posted to Hoopla.com. And sorry, but as the years go on, I wonder if Ball Four will, in fact, lose its edge.
Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf
Our motto: “If it can fit on a bookshelf, it fits here.”
Ron Kaplan by Arnold Roth
In my "day job," I'm the features and sports editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper. I'm also the editor of the Bibliography Committee Newsletter for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
I did a piece on the award-winning cartoonist and he was nice enough to "immortalize" me.
What I’m reading
What I'm reading now: Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between
So far, so: funny and depressing
What I just read: The Corporal Was a Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie
A good reminder of those who served. B+
AND
MUZZY FIELD: TALES FROM A FORGOTTEN BALLPARK
Grade: Every town has a palce like this. A nice piece of Americana. B
What's next: Munson: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain
My article on the later biographies of Babe Ruth appears in
Statistical Theory
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I don’t think “Ball Four” will lose its edge. My son, a 17-year-old high school pitcher, is reading “Ball Four” now, after me prompting him several time over the past couple years. He is getting it, understanding that baseball at a competitive level is cut-throat, but nothing beats the time in the dugout. Enjoy the game — now.
The era of Bouton’s book is as”relevant” now as reading about Babe Ruth’s era was to Bouton’s generation. So much has changed in America (and the world) that his anecdotes now seem like charming anachronisms, like seeing pictures of a family from the 1940s gathered together around the radio.
That’s not to say that Ball Four is not a classic, just in a different place than it was when it first came out.