The Bookshelf Conversations from Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf

Mar 05 2025 10 ep. 27 mins 23

The Bookshelf Conversations from Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf Podcast artwork

A blog dedicated to news, previews, reviews, and interviews about books and other media about the National Pastime.

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The Bookshelf Conversations #192: Harvey Araton

Mar 05 2025 31 mins

As I say in the video, this is the second time I’ve chatted with Harvey Araton about Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift. (The website is out of date but you’ll get a lot of info about him and his work nonetheless.) The previous Conversation was more than a decade […]

The Bookshelf Conversation #191: Scott Bolohan

Feb 25 2025 29 mins

And here I thought I was so smart, that I was up on just about everything when it came to baseball off the field. Wrong. At this point, I don’t even know how I discovered The Twin Bill, which launched more than four years ago. Rather than me trying to explain, let’s get it straight […]

The Bookshelf Conversations #189: Jean Fruth

Feb 12 2025 29 mins

It’s always a pleasure to speak with Jean Fruth. Whatever project she takes on is full of passion, whether it’s photographing baseball across small town America (Grassroots Baseball: Route 66) or talking with some of the greats of the game about how they got their start (Grassroots Baseball: Where Legends Begin), or, in her latest […]

The Bookshelf Conversations #188: Ben Yagoda

Feb 05 2025 31 mins

A bit of a departure here. Ben Yagoda has not written a book about baseball (yet). Nor has he written a song or made a film about the game. But he is a super fan and has written reviews of others’ books about the game. Close enough for jazz. I wanted to speak with him […]

The Bookshelf Conversations #187: Bill Littlefield

Jan 30 2025 24 mins

There was something about Bill Littlefield’s voice when he read his poetry (or as he refers to it, doggerel) on NPR’s Only a Game that was so soothing, as opposed to those loud-mouthed shouters on various sports talk programs. I miss him. But to prove that the Bookshelf is timeless, I had him on recently […]

The Bookshelf Conversations #186: Tyler Kepner

Jan 20 2025 31 mins

I knew things would go well when I saw the collection of caps behind Tyler Kepner, senior writer for The Athletic and author of The Grandest Game: A History of the World Series and K: A History of of Baseball in Ten Pitches. Like Kepner — and most young baseball fans — I had dreams […]

The Bookshelf Conversation #184: Keith O’Brien

Oct 17 2024 25 mins

I’ve long believed that the death of a famous athlete leads to renewed interest in any books about him, a theory that holds when you look at the weekly Baseball Best-Sellers. Sure enough, the recent passing of Pete Rose provided an uptick in sales of books about the controversial superstar and since Keith O’Brien wrote […]

The Bookshelf Conversation #183: Dan Epstein on James Earl Jones

Sep 11 2024 20 mins

It was a shocker to see the breaking news on CNN on Monday that James Earl Jones had passed away. The tributes that followed seemed to highlight two roles: Darth Vader from the Star Wars universe and Terrence Mann from Field of Dreams. But Jones, who died at the age of 93, was also in […]

The Bookshelf Conversations #182: Jim Chapman

Aug 08 2024 21 mins

Just about 30 years ago, I bought Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon. Even if you’re not a connoisseur of the early 20th century game, I’m willing to be you’ve sen photos taken by Conlon. Many of the close-ups are haunting. To me, the players always seemed much older than the 20- […]

The Bookshelf Conversation #181: Noah Gittell

Aug 01 2024 30 mins

I don’t have a whole lot of hobbies, so when I see a book that combines any of them on my periodic “Coming down the pike” stories, I get extra pumped. Baseball: The Movie covers two of them. Now that I no longer have Turner Classic Movies, since they went to a subscription platform, I […]