Ken Davidoff

Ken Davidoff has been covering Major League Baseball for 30 years. He served as a baseball columnist at The New York Post from 2012 through 2022 and retains an emeritus status there. Prior to joining The Post, Ken wrote about baseball for Newsday and The Record of North Jersey. He has appeared on ESPN, the MLB Network, YES Network, CNN, and others. A former president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Ken now works as an adjunct professor at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., teaching various journalism and writing courses. He lives in New York City.

Dr. Harley Rotbart

Dr. Harley Rotbart, is a nationally-recognized parenting expert, physician-scientist, speaker and educator, has been a Pediatrics specialist for the past 38 years and is Professor and Vice Chairman Emeritus of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Denver. He is the author of more than 175 medical and scientific publications – original research papers, book chapters, scientific abstracts, and books, including numerous books for lay audiences: THE ON DECK CIRCLE OF LIFE: 101 LESSONS FROM THE DUGOUT (iUniverse, Feb. 2007); GERM PROOF YOUR KIDS (ASM Press, Nov. 2007); NO REGRETS PARENTING (Andrews McMeel, 2012) and MIRACLES WE HAVE SEEN (HCI Books, 2016). More about all of these books, including complete reviews, can be found at www.harleyrotbart.com. His latest book, NO REGRETS LIVING (HCI Books) will be published March, 2021.

Dr. Rotbart been named to Best Doctors in America every year from 1996 through his retirement from clinical practice in 2014, as well as receiving numerous other national awards for research, teaching, and clinical work. Dr. Rotbart serves on the Advisory Boards of Parents Magazine and Parents.com and previously served on the Advisory Board of Children’s Health Magazine. Dr. Rotbart has also served as consultant and advisory board member to many of the leading consumer products, pharmaceutical, diagnostic, and consumer health companies in the country. Dr. Rotbart regularly speaks to large national audiences of parents, school, and youth sports organizations, as well as to community groups around the country, and national professional organizations of physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals. Dr. Rotbart’s broad platform as a physician-scientist and parenting/children’s health authority has also been enhanced by his many media appearances on national TV, radio, print, online and mommy blogs. Dr. Rotbart contributed a monthly blog column to Parents Magazine for 6 years. In addition, Dr. Rotbart participated in two promotional satellite media tours with former American Idol finalists (Brooke White, 2009; Danny Gokey, 2010). Really. That American Idol. Dr. Rotbart and his wife, Sara, are the parents of three adult kids and grandparents of three, on all of whom he continues to practice what he preaches.

101 Lessons From the Dugout (Bloomsbury, February, 2026)

Every player or fan of baseball and softball thinks they know the game-and they do, at least the rules and the strategy. But take a deeper look, and you’ll see there is so much more to be learned beyond the strikeouts, walks, base stealing, and double plays. Hidden behind the game’s fundamentals are subtle real-world messages and meanings that help lead to success off the field just as much as on it.

In 101 Lessons from the Dugout, famed baseball writer and insider Ken Davidoff and renowned parenting expert and writer Dr. Harley Rotbart decode these messages in brief snippets for young ballplayers and fans. Each lesson contains an individual feature of the game followed by a pearl of wisdom or two to inspire readers. These lessons show that picking the right pitch to swing at is the ultimate exercise of good judgment; that a runner leading off first base demonstrates the balancing of risk and reward; and that the self-discipline of tagging up is true impulse control.

Every pitch, hit, and play on the baseball and softball diamond is its own life lesson. From homework and humility, to punctuality and perseverance, to responsibility and resilience, 101 Lessons from the Dugout offers a game plan for happiness and success in the major leagues of school, friendship, and life.

 

No Regrets Parenting, Updated and Expanded Edition Paperback
(Andrews McMeel, September 28, 2021)

For every type of family, this revised and expanded edition is the quintessential, open-to-all parenting guidebook, guaranteed to help you find more time for your kids and for yourself.

It’s not how much time you have with your kids, but how you spend that time that matters. By pediatric doctor, celebrated author, and parenting genius Harley Rotbart, No Regrets Parenting, Updated and Expanded Edition offers the chance to shift perspectives and priorities. With the goal to help the modern parent juggle family responsibilities, professional lives, and personal lives, No Regrets Parenting is all about time—finding enough of it and making the most of it. Car pool, bath time, soccer practice, homework, dinner hour, and sleepovers all become more than just obligations and hurdles to overcome to get through the day.

Accompanying his tried-and-true advice, Dr. Rotbart has included new content to address the ever-changing needs of families, taking unprecedented pandemics into account, along with the new challenges parents are facing. No Regrets Parenting, Updated and Expanded Edition answers the overwhelming questions: How can you do it all and, most importantly, how can you stay sane while doing it all?

 

NO REGRETS LIVING (HCI, March 16, 2021)

Dr. Harley Rotbart’s prescription for a life filled with gratitude for what we have and appreciation for what we have done with our time on earth.

No Regrets Living is a proactive, 7-step plan to help us better appreciate what we have in our lives, and take greater pride in what we’ve done with our lives—without spending precious time and energy wishing things had turned out differently. Of course all of us have had disappointments, lamentable moments. For some, those times have led to lasting unhappiness and a life that feels unfulfilled, even meaningless. Others have found ways to move past the downturns and find better ahead. No Regrets Living leads us to see the world through a lens of appreciation for the magnificence around us, which in turn helps us accommodate those not-so-magnificent moments in our lives.

Dr. Rotbart brings his unique perspective as physician, scientist, child of a Holocaust survivor, and heart patient to No Regrets Living. Part self-help manual, part inspirational road map, part moving memoir, No Regrets Living is a blueprint for reaching greater satisfaction and fulfillment in life.

Woven into the timeless message of the book are especially timely observations on the COVID-19 pandemic from Dr. Rotbart’s expert perspective as an infectious diseases physician, including coping mechanisms and paths for going forward as individuals and as a society.

Miracles We Have Seen: America’s Leading Physicians Share Stories They Can’t Forget Paperback (HCI – September 13, 2016)

This is a book of miracles―medical events witnessed by leading physicians for which there is no reasonable medical explanation, or, if there is, the explanation itself is extraordinary. These dramatic first-person essays detail spectacular serendipities, impossible cures, breathtaking resuscitations, extraordinary awakenings, and recovery from unimaginable disasters. Still other essays give voice to cases in which the physical aspects were less dramatic than the emotional aspects, yet miraculous and transformational for everyone involved. Positive impacts left in the wake of even the gravest of tragedies, profound triumphs of heart and spirit.

Preeminent physicians in many specialties, including deans and department heads on the faculties of the top university medical schools in the country describe, in everyday language and with moving testimony, their very personal reactions to these remarkable clinical experiences.

Among the extraordinary cases poignantly recounted by the physicians witnessing them:

• A priest visiting a hospitalized patient went into cardiac arrest on the elevator, which opened up on the cardiac floor, right at the foot of the cardiac specialist, at just the right moment.
• A tiny premature baby dying from irreversible lung disease despite the most intensive care who recovered almost immediately after being taken from his hospital bed and placed on his mother’s chest
• President John F. Kennedy’s son Patrick, who died shortly after birth, and whose disease eventually led to research that saved generations of babies.
• A nine-year-old boy who was decapitated in a horrific car accident but survived without neurological damage.
• A woman who conceived and delivered a healthy baby―despite having had both of her fallopian tubes surgically removed.
• A young man whose only hope for survival was a heart transplant, but just at the moment he developed a potentially fatal complication making a transplant impossible, his own heart began healing itself.
• A teenage girl near death after contracting full-blown rabies who became the first patient ever to recover from that disease after an unexpected visit by Timothy Dolan, the man who would go on to become the Archbishop of New York.
• A Manhattan window-washer who fell 47 stories―and not only became the only person ever to survive a fall from that height, but went on to make a full recovery.

Miracles We Have Seen is a book of inspiration and optimism, and a compelling glimpse into the lives of physicians―their humanity and determined devotion to their patients and their patients’ families. It reminds us that what we don’t know or don’t understand isn’t necessarily cause for fear, and can even be reason for hope.

940 Saturdays: Family Activities & a Keepsake Journal (Potter Style, September 2, 2014)

There are 940 Saturdays between a child’s birth and the day he or she turns 18.

That may sound like a lot when there are adventures to plan and hours to fill. But as your child learns to walk, ride a bicycle, and drive, the years pass quickly. This beautiful package includes both a removable booklet with a thousand ideas for family activities that you and your child will love at every age, and a keepsake journal for preserving what you saw and did, thought and felt, so you can savor these memories in the years to come.

No Regrets Parenting: Turning Long Days and Short Years into Cherished Moments with Your Kids (Andrews McMeel, February 21, 2012)

The 10 p.m. news hasn’t even started, but you’re too exhausted to watch; who can stay awake that late? Car pools, lunch bags, after-school activities, dinner, homework, bath time, bedtime. All on top of your own job (or jobs!) and the other realities of adulthood. You have just enough energy left to drag yourself to bed so you can wake early and start the routine all over again. Each day with young kids feels like a week, each week like a month.

Yet as every new birthday passes, childhood seems to be streaking by at warp speed – five month-olds become five year-olds and then 15 year olds in the blink of an eye. The colorful mobiles hanging from their cribs morph into tricycles, which morph into driving permits.

And then, poof, they’re gone. Sunrise, sunset.

How can we possibly be working so hard to get through each crazy, chaotic day with our kids, and yet have the years fly by so quickly? Everyone knows it, everyone bemoans it, yet no one seems to know how to slow down the years while cramming 25 hours into every day.

Well, Dr. Rotbart doesn’t claim to know how to slow down time either. But he does have some ideas about how to maximize and optimize the time you spend with your kids – while they are still tucked into their bedrooms where you can peek in on them each night before you go to sleep. This is not a book about protecting your adult priorities or nurturing your relationship with your spouse, per se. There are plenty of those books, and lots of advice out there about how to look out for your needs while still getting the kids to soccer practice on time. Rather, this is a book about how to prioritize your kids’ needs within your adult schedules, and how to stretch and enhance the time you spend with your kids.  And if you are able to manage those juggling acts, you’ll discover something remarkable – you will be more successful in protecting adult time for yourself and your spouse, and you’ll feel less guilty doing it.  More importantly, you’ll be able to look back and take pride in knowing that you squeezed every moment and memory out of your kids’ childhoods, and that your kids’ memories of you are vivid and loving. You can’t do it over again, at least with these same kids, so do it right the first time.

This is a book about time management with kids, from crib through college. But it’s not like other “time management books.” Those are geared for efficiency with kids rather than for intimacy with them, for organizing rather than optimizing the time parents spend with their kids. How to get everything done is not the same as how to make the time spent with kids more meaningful and memorable. This is a book about capturing the precious moments of parenting that otherwise are lost in the name of efficiency. It will guide you in taking the mundane, exhausting routines of parenthood and turning them into special parenting events. It’s all about redefining “quality time.”