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David M. Henkin, "Out of the Ballpark: How to Think about Baseball" (Oxford UP, 2026)
01:03:14
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with David M. Henken, professor of History at UC Berkeley. We're discussing his forthcoming book, out of the how to Think About Baseball. Ever since I was a kid, baseball has transfixed me. Whether it was playing or spectating, I found myself hypnotized by the rhythms of the game. It was also, in many ways, my entry point into history. My dad regaled me with the stories of the Miracle Mets and Tom Seaver's pitching prowess. I grew up attending UCLA baseball games at Jackie Robinson Field and learned through Jackie's story, the history of the American civil rights movement. Today, I live a stone's throw from the site of the historic Ebbets Field where Jackie first broke the color barrier. Baseball, to me, has always been more than a sport. I love encountering books like out of the Ballpark that treat baseball and sports in general as a serious subject worthy of the type of inquiry that historians often give other subjects like politics, war and religion. Baseball in particular is a unique subject for historical inquiry in part, as David puts it, because it is historically self conscious sport attuned to every detail of its own history. Though its roots and mythology are deeply American, baseball has transformed and been transformed by places like Japan, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Cuba. Out of the Ballpark takes readers from sandlots to city streets, from communist islands to Imperial Japan to help us explore the history and cultural impact of a global pastime. I'm thrilled today to have David Henkin on the New Books Network. David, thanks for joining me today.
- [01:37]
B
Thank you, Caleb. It's great to be here. I'm excited to have this conversation.
- [01:41]
A
I don't know what it is, I just love reading about baseball. I think I like reading about baseball almost as much as I like watching it and certainly as much as I, I like playing it. It's just this just such a fascinating sport. I find it so utterly relaxing and I just, you know, every year that I watch it, I just seem to enjoy it more, which feels strange because so many other things that I loved as a kid, I just not interested in them anymore. So I don't know what it is about baseball. There's something unique about it and I was wondering if you just tell us a little about yourself and you know, obviously you're a historian, you've written, you know, books on other topics. But how did you find yourself to writing about baseball?
- [02:19]
B
There's one trajectory that connects it to What I've written about in the past, and one that fundamentally does not. So I teach and write about 19th century America, primarily the social and cultural history of that time and place. And so in the course of doing that, I encounter all kinds of interesting facts about baseball, because that is really the origin of baseball. Baseball is a spectator sport, and especially in American cities, which is the site of a lot of my research. So one could say that I'm just. I've written about other aspects of 19th century everyday life, including leisure, culture, and entertainment. So why not baseball? But I don't really think that's how it came to be. I think it came to be because, and this is in some ways an obstacle, I am a big baseball fan. I have always, like you, been fascinated with all aspects of the game. I began working on a project, which I'm still working on, about partisan politics and thinking about the history of people caring about things from a distance, or the history of people investing in outcomes or identifying with teams. And in the process of that, I began thinking more about spectator sports and reading about it. And then an editor heard that I was giving a talk about this somewhere and asked me if I'd ever thought about writing about baseball. And I hadn't, except indirectly. And then I decided to think about what that would be like. And in a way, it has involved trying to overcome the kind of interest in baseball that you self described and that I identify with, which is this feeling that baseball has some unique grip on my attention and that baseball provides a particular pleasure and that in some ways I'm like a believer, right? And I thought to write about baseball in a way that would be useful for other people, both people who are like committed believers and people who find the sport boring or have never even heard of it. To make sense of its place in culture, in history and politics and society, required trying to take a big step back from my own, almost like a gesture here at psychoanalysis, to really try to divest myself of all the beliefs that I instinctively have about what makes baseball important and try to think about what might make baseball interesting and important if I didn't exactly have those beliefs. So it's a little bit like if. If I'd been a religious Catholic or. And someone said, oh, we write a book explaining something about the nature of Catholicism, and that would require that I stop or at least bracket all the things that I believed about the Trinity or about. Or about Christ or about. Or about the Catholic Church, and just thought about, okay, well, how does this fit in with other things and with other kinds of commitments that I don't have.
- [05:27]
A
In my introduction, I was initially going to. Had initially described baseball as a sort of a secular religion for me and I think for many other people, but that felt a little blasphemous. But that is how I feel in many ways. The ritual aspects of it, watching opening day, going through the motions at the ballpark, the seventh inning stretch and whatnot. I don't really know why I do or why we do all these things, but I do them because I feel like at a certain point now I feel like I have to.
- [05:57]
B
Well, I do think a lot of people experience baseball in that way. And I would also specify there's a difference between the baseball fan in general and then the partisan baseball fan. Those are obviously overlapping groups. There are people who love the game and don't really necessarily aren't emotionally invested in outcomes or team allegiances. And there are other people who actually care quite a bit about whether the Cubs are going to win the World Series, but don't actually really like the game that much and wouldn't watch it. Apart from that, I think that partisan fandom in sports has lots of overlaps with many things, including religion. And you see that in the role of the kinds of magical thinking that partisan fans have. Obviously the superstitions, but also just the idea that their own thoughts, beliefs, their own personal fidelity, their own faith often is somehow going to affect. Going to affect the outcome on the field. And I think that is obviously like a religious frame, frame of mind, right?
- [07:11]
A
Like, who knows if flipping your cap inside out when your team is down is actually going to help them rally back and win. But there's something about it that makes it feel like it does have an impact.
- [07:20]
B
Even if it does, and I'll just say otherwise for full disclosure, I. I was raised at an Orthodox Jewish home and continued to be a traditionally observant Jew. And so the idea that what you wear on your head and how it's positioned has some kind of soteriological or, I don't know, cosmological significance seems as natural to me as any other bizarre belief.
- [07:49]
A
So that's an amazing connection and one I had not thought about. But certainly I think that there's a lot of truth there part of baseball. I realized a few years ago that I really didn't know that much about the history of baseball beyond just the sort of the things that I had heard. And I learned pretty quickly that a lot of the things that I had learned were completely untrue or Likely untrue, for example, around the founding of baseball. So could you talk a little about the origins of baseball and basically the myth that the Union, Major General Abner Doubleday, created the game? Why has this myth persisted, and what do we actually know about the founding of the game?
- [08:31]
B
Well, so I would distinguish, as I do early on in this book, between the game and the spectator sport. So the game, I would say, has origins in similar games played in England, because it was really from England that these games were. They may have been played elsewhere, too, but they were really from England that these games were brought over. Most notably the Game of Rounders, which is a children's game. It's actually referred to in Jane Austen, but it's called. Actually not called Rounders. There in Northanger Abbey, it's called baseball. Two words. So that's where the game comes from. But I'm not, in this book, not so much interested in the game as such, but I'm really interested in the spectator sport and an organized spectator sport, where people are. Who are not on the field, are interested in the game and watching it, are interested in the connection between one game and another, develop allegiances and consumer patterns. I mean, these are all the things that we take for granted about spectator sports. That is American in origin. And it emerged first in Northeastern cities in the United States. I would say it's. If you think of it as a really organized spectator sport, I would date it to the 1840s. If you just think of it as a sport that people enjoy playing and watching and thinking about, maybe it's another 10, 20 years older than that. But it was an urban sport. There are many aspects of the game and the sport that retain traces of its urban origins. But over the course of the. I'd say the late 19th century, it began to be a bit more associated with pastoralism and with pastoral settings. And so the fabrication of the Abner Doubleday myth, which has no documented basis in fact, was, I think, motivated by baseball promoters, managers, entrepreneurs, not primarily to dispute its urban origins, but to dispute its foreign origins. Right. To claim that baseball is authentically American. But in the process, they also, and I think, had, you know, reasons to want to do, also located it in a. In a. In a small village setting. So that's the Cooperstown legend. Whereas really, you know, I'd say the origin of baseball is where Major League Baseball continues to be headquartered, which is in New York. And since I think I'm talking to you in Brooklyn, I would say also that Brooklyn, which was a separate city, in the 19th century was also a major sort of ground zero for baseball as a spectator sport. The earliest organized clubs were in New York and in Brooklyn.
- [11:34]
A
The sort of, the competing visions that I have in my head of early baseball is on the one hand, it's the field of dreams, sort of mythos of, you know, the cornfield, you know, the perfect, beautiful field in the cornfield with, you know, endless rolling, rolling fields. And, you know, you could, you could hit the ball as far as the eye can see. And then the other is the, you know, the sort of the stickball in the city. You know, you're, you're hitting it, you're breaking windows, getting chased out by, by, by, by, by the adults around. You know, it's the, it's the urban. It's both, both simultaneously very urban and it feels very rural. And you talk a little bit about, you know, oftentimes these teams, they're identified with cities. That wasn't always the case. And it's, it's certainly not the case in everywhere. Like certain teams are associated with corporations, like in Japan. Could you talk a little about this sort of municipal association and just the development of these teams beyond just these kind of fun clubs that people would play on as a sort of amateur hobby? Yeah.
- [12:37]
B
So I would say that both of your images, both the Iowa cornfields and the sort of like Lower east side stickball blocks are really early 20th century images perpetuated over the course of the 20th century. But baseball as a 19th century sport really was urban. And, and in the very early years, teams would represent neighborhoods, or they might represent an occupation, or they might represent a subculture. But as it organized into a sport of professionals, it quickly used interurban competition as the basis for cementing fan allegiances. And so the players would come from wherever, but the team would have both a physical and a symbolic home in a city. And in part for economic reasons, a lot of the early leagues restricted the number of teams that could be in a league from a given city. So then that team was uniquely positioned. Now. So it's not the case, say, in Dominican Republic or to some extent in Japan or in Cuba, in part because leagues never sought that restriction, in part because the number of big cities was smaller at the time that baseball developed as a sport, and then for other reasons having to do with those countries, but professional major league baseball continues, I think, to identify with cities. There was a moment in the 20th century where that link was somewhat attenuated, where first of all, those stadiums were not located in urban settings. Anymore. They had less distinctive urban feel to them, but. And often, sometimes they even took names that were not, you know, the California Angels or the, you know, Texas Rangers. They, they didn't actually trumpet their, their urban connections. But more recently in the 21st century, teams have actually decided to double down and, and move stadiums back to town to classic urban settings like either downtowns or ports and wharves, and have been more likely to reclaim, like the Florida Marlins reclaiming an urban name to become Miami, or the California Angels reclaiming a city that they don't even play in to become the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Anyway, so cities are important in two ways. What I just spoke about maybe is not the more important way, which is interurban competition as a organizing principle for partisan fan allegiance and team identity. More importantly, I think that baseball grew up along with other forms of urban commercial leisure and in part for that reason resembles them in many ways. I mean, people write about baseball mostly like talk about what makes baseball unique. My book does talk about many of the things that make baseball distinctive, but the book is actually more interested in showing connections and continuities between baseball and other spectator sports and between spectator sports and other spectatorial enterprises or other commercial leisure activities. Those commercial leisure activities are, I'd say, historically urban. They depend on patterns of urban leisure, on public transportation, on masses of live audiences, on communications networks or publishing networks that then broadcast those live audiences to non live audiences or to remote audiences. All of that, I think, is part of the history of the big city.
- [16:30]
A
Baseball as a sport is interesting in part because it is very popular internationally, but in specific places. It's not like soccer, where it's basically popular in every country until, you know, America. Less so, but maybe a lot more. Recently, soccer. Soccer was less popular or like a sport like football, very American sport that hasn't really broken through to other countries, though it is becoming a bit more popular with these new international games that have been played. But, but baseball is. Is uniquely popular in the U.S. in Japan, in Cuba, in the Dominican Republic. How did baseball find its way to Japan and Cuba?
- [17:15]
B
So I think there's a simple answer that's misleading, and then I try to give a better answer in the book. Simple answer that's misleading is it came from the United States to those places and was cemented over time because these places had various connections to the United States through imperialism, through hegemony, through foreign policy, through military occupation, or through economic relations. That's not untrue, but it's misleading because there are plenty of places where the US has had that role, where baseball didn't take off. So just to take. If it really were about military occupation, you couldn't explain why baseball is wildly popular on the Dominican Republic side of the Isle of Hispaniola and is not popular at all on the Haitian side. So I think to understand that, we have to focus. Focus a little bit less on US Empire and more on the role of two other countries in spreading the game. Because as you said, Caleb, it's a international sport, but it's not really a global sport in the sense that there are huge parts of the world, unlike soccer, where it's unknown, illegible, unappealing. But there are lots of parts of the world where it is not only popular, legible, and appealing, but also in some ways, the national sport. And so Cuba and Japan are very important. And I think you can trace some of the popularity of baseball or some features of the baseball map to the empires, if you want to call it that, of Cuba and Japan. Well, the Japanese empire is a little more straightforward because it was actually an empire. Japan, between the late 1800s and 1945, dominated, in various ways an entire swath of East Asia and the Pacific and created formal colonies in places like Korea and Taiwan and brought baseball there as part of its own imperial project. It's true in the case of Korea and Taiwan that some American missionaries had introduced the game there, but that doesn't account for its role. What accounts for its role in those countries is the fact that it was part of the Japanese imperial project, much as cricket was part of the British imperial project in, let's say, South Asia or in Oceania. So the part of the map is explained by Japan. The Cuba one is more interesting because Cuba adopted baseball very, very quickly and as a commercialized spectator sport when it was still a colony not of the United States, but of Spain. But it reflected connections, connections of travel and of commerce and of information exchange with the US So it was connected to the US but it quickly had its own life. And Cuban baseball had lots of different features, both because of the. The different weather. It's a game where one could play in the winter, and because of different racial politics that made Cuban baseball hospitable to many baseball players who were excluded from the major leagues in the U.S. mainland. So baseball is very popular in Cuba, and baseball spread from Cuba not through imperial conquest or political hegemony, but just through contact and media and news. And so the key thing, if you look at the map of the Americas is, is the place Spanish Speaking and does the place have coastline on the Caribbean? If it has both of these things, the odds are that baseball is quite popular there. If it has neither of those things, then, you know, like Argentina, then it's less likely to be a sport that's, that's played there. The one, the one exception is, or it's not really an exception, one seeming exception is Curacao. That's the only place in, in the Spanish and sorry, in the, in the Caribbean that does not have a historical connection to, to the Spanish Empire. It was a Dutch colony. But baseball in Curacao is very much influenced by Venezuela, access to another Spanish speaking Caribbean country. And though Curacao and baseball players like Curacaoans more generally are multilingual people, the dominant, it seems from my reading, the dominant language on the baseball field in Curacao is significantly Spanish. So again, Japanese empire and Cuban commercial and media contact help account for lots of the seeming peculiarities of the baseball map.
- [22:07]
A
Yeah, and baseball, especially the mlb is all the better for it in a sense because of the great talent, the great non American talent that just dominates the game. Now I think we'll get into that a bit more because I think that that's part of the, the story of where baseball is headed, that it is just moving beyond the phenom of Shohei Ohtani is really changing the game, I think for the better. But we'll get into that. There's a lot more about 100 years of history to go through before we get to Shohei Ohtani.
- [22:40]
B
When we get to Shohei Otani. I had the idea of something to say, but as a reminder.
- [22:43]
A
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I want to talk a little bit about Jackie Robinson and his legacy and also just baseball in America before Jackie Robinson, because, you know, baseball like the rest of America, you know, was, you know, very much. You know, it was, it was segregated society. And you know, not in the north and the South. You know, there's different aspects of society were completely segregated and, and baseball was no different. You had the mlb, which was essentially the white league, and then you had the Negro leagues, where a lot of great African American players played. And Jackie Robinson was the first black player to play in the mlb. And obviously in many ways this occurrence completely changed not only baseball, but it changed American society. And I was wondering if you just share a little bit about how important Jackie Robinson was not just to baseball, but just to America, period.
- [23:51]
B
Well, I actually do think it was more important to America, period, than it was to baseball. I mean, it was Important to baseball in many ways, including it was crucial in destroying the Negro Leagues. Not his own singular signing, but the, the integration, the sort of high profile integration of the National League did ultimately lead to the demise of the Negro Leagues. And it had some impact on the style of play in major leagues and had some impact on the composition of crowds in the major leagues. But I think it's actually more interesting to think about why the United States was so invested in the desegregation of baseball, maybe even invested negatively as well as positively. And I think if you don't go on too much about this, because I don't in the book, so it'd be a bit misleading. But if you think about the post World War II era as really initiating a fundamental change in the attitudes of white Americans toward inclusion and integration, fueled in many ways by aspects of the war. And you sort of see the period from the, from the end of the war until, let's say until 1964, 65, the civil rights act and the Voting Rights act as a period of integration. When I teach about this, I like to emphasize how early the desegregation of Major League baseball was compared. It's before Brown versus Board of Education. It's before the counter sit ins in North Carolina. It's really a very early moment on a timeline not of the civil rights movement because a lot of the civil rights movement for integration had begun decades earlier after the Great Migration. But in terms of the success of the desegregation movement and the Jackie Robinson incident comes early and has a big impact. It really does, I think, not only change opinions, but in many ways I think it does reinforce the sense that the public integration of traditionally segregated activities and spaces was in the American interest, that it served U.S. cold War interests, that it, that it felt good for white Americans and that it felt good for black Americans in many cases too. So I think it was a phenomenally important event. Now Major League Baseball has now turned this event into a kind of. Jackie Robinson, I would say, has been beatified. I mean that's. He's a saint like no other. I mean, every April you can't wear his number. No one can wear his number. And on April 15, everyone has to wear his number there. You know, his number has become both like a shrine and a rel. Anyway, everything about Jackie Robinson has become for Major League Baseball a well intentioned but also self serving religious, religious symbol. And that's interesting too. But I don't think that's so much about. I don't know, I'll leave it at that, actually. Yeah, yeah.
- [27:32]
A
It's a, the legacy of Jackie Robinson as opposed to, you know, the actual, you know, the real biography and history of him. Of course, in anything, you know, someone who's, who's that consequential in history, they're oftentimes turned into something that is more than just a human. I think it's accurate to say that he's essentially a saint of baseball at this point. In many ways, for me as a kid, I feel like this was a very important thing because it was a great entry point into history. I could really understand it, I could see it, I could visualize it in terms of the context of the baseball field. But yes, at the same time too, it also has become a self serving thing and the idea that, that the MLB is always looking out to, you know, to treat the players well. Of course, you know, there have been been plenty of, of labor issues, labor disputes all throughout the years of, of players feeling like they aren't being paid enough, that they aren't being treated well. Obviously, you know, especially if you look at the minor leagues, many of these players are making below minimum wage essentially. And you look at the kind of the competition between labor and capital in the book and I was sort of, you talk about this power struggle, how it's, how it's changed and evolved over time and especially like the development of the Major League Baseball Player Association.
- [28:59]
B
Yes. I mean, as you pointed out, the book is divided into thematic chapters and one of the ones toward the middle of the book is this idea of labor and capital. I am resisting in this chapter the idea that this is a new phenomenon and pointing out how from the mid 19th century, from the moment that baseball is commercialized and professionalized, in other words, from the moment that there is a company making money off the game and players who are being paid to do so, as in some cases a full time job, there has been a struggle. And the structure of that struggle is in some ways different from other labor capital situations, which is that the players have unique talents. I don't mean they're the only ones who can play baseball, but from the perspective of fans and owners, they have to be the best at what they do. So they're really difficult to replace. Right. It's not like many other industries where the people who manage could replace them or where there are other people waiting in the wings for their jobs who would be just as good because there's a competition. And so if it were a different form of theater and you could say, well, I can't get this particular actor, this particular dancer. Well, then you would try to get someone else who was not, maybe not quite as good. But the competition in spectator sports calls attention to who actually is better than who in a way that you would think would give the players lots of. On the other hand, though, and this is true of baseball in a way that's not true, say, of boxing or wrestling or even tennis, it's a team sport, and it depends for interest on there being competition. So that's two problems from the player's standpoint. One is they can't actually sell their or even exhibit their talents without a whole range of fellow cast members. I mean, you could have a home run Derby or something like that. But most of the things that baseball players do exceptionally well are only even visible with a whole series of teammates and opponents. And also, there has to be competition. The sport won't be as lucrative. The theater won't be as popular if it's just one good team. If it's like the Harlem Globetrotters, that's not the model. Beating up on another team. There has to be another team that is possibly as good from the perspective of the owners or the fans. Hopefully they're not quite as good, but they have to be plausibly as good, or there's no interest in the game. And then the way spectator sports have evolved, they have to be several teams, and there has to be some kind of. Just from an economic standpoint, there has to be some kind of competitive balance. So these are the things that help owners depress salaries. And the fact that often what's being sold is not even the team, but the league. I have a chapter in this book about leagues and associations and how remarkable institutions those are go way back right into essentially to the 1870s. And it's often the league that is being sold. If it were just freestanding, there's the Mets and then there's the Yankees, and they play each other, and you root for the Mets and your neighborhoods for the Yankees, that's fine, but it's not actually. Baseball would not have its current appeal, as would most other team sports, without the thing that the league provides, which is not only a pathway to a championship, but historical continuity in the competition, such that that history becomes interesting to fans, such that the statistics become meaningful to fans. So there are all these things going against the players. In other words, they're the only ones who can do what they do. But there's so many things that have to happen and have to be in place that owners and leagues control for them to really be able to capitalize on their talent. So most of the history of the struggle between labor and capital in baseball is pretty shifted toward management. Very briefly that changed really. I mean, I don't like to emphasize the, the role of any one person, even Jackie Robinson, but if you want to talk about one person, Marvin Miller, the former steel worker union advisor who became the head of the players union in the 60s, really transformed the union and persuaded the players to see themselves as having a real common interest and was able, in part with good strategy, in part with bad strategy from the owners, in part with the help of the courts, and in part with, you know, against the backdrop of ideas about civil rights and workers rights, was able to really reposition baseball players bargaining status at the table and through things like collective bargaining agreements and arbitrations. This is going to get a little bit detailed, so, so you can read the book for a brief summary of how he did it. But that's the big story. And I say the baseball players union is a remarkably strong union compared to other North American sports. And the Marvin Miller era played a huge role in it.
- [34:50]
A
Right. And so much of the game, as you point out, it is a team sport. Obviously individual players can shine through, through. What's maybe different compared from baseball to basketball is that statistically the difference between the very best baseball players and the more middling baseball players. Unless you are very familiar with how statistics in baseball work, you might not be able to tell that much of a difference. Okay, So a guy batted 250 versus another guy batted 280. What does that even mean? Versus a player scored 30 points a game versus another player scored 2 points a game. You can tell the difference a bit more.
- [35:25]
B
And the structure of the game is a little bit, I mean baseball, I'm not arguing this book that baseball is fundamentally different from all other sports, but in this respect it is. Just the structure of the game makes it different from basketball. In basketball, every time a team is on offense, you know, the LeBron James, Michael Jordan, whoever has an opportunity to score in what at least appears to be single handedly in baseball, they're very. There are very few ways to score single handedly. And most of the time your best offensive player has no impact. Most of you, you're watching the best player on your team is on the bench and ineligible to contribute in any way. So imagine if basketball were like that. You have to constantly be rotating one guy out of your bench and only that guy could score. Right?
- [36:16]
A
And so much of Baseball too is the consistency of it. As far as I know, no other sport has more games a year. It's 162games, which is just remarkable. And part of what I love about it is in a sense that I don't have to get too emotionally invested in one game over another. It's very relaxing. It's a great thing to throw on at the end of the day.
- [36:42]
B
That's your experience. It's true that you don't have to. I Root for 162 games and every single game to me is an opportunity for exhilaration or crushing disappointment. So it doesn't have that effect on all fans. But it is true that many things that might distinguish baseball from other team sports in the US are, are attributable to the fact that there are 162 of them.
- [37:10]
A
Right. And so much of this too has to do with the game. For years it has gone through various phases where people have complained that it's too boring or not exciting. Whether that's going all the way back to the dead ball era to more recently with people complaining that the games felt too long. I frankly liked how long the games were. You know, now the games are much shorter with the pitch clock. And there's a lot of spectacle around the game, whether it's watching it on television or, you know, my personal. I like to listen to it on the radio. Personally, I find it really enjoyable that way. And I was wondering, can you talk a little bit about how baseball has been transformed by radio, by television, by these technologies that allow people to interface with the game without going to the stadium?
- [38:08]
B
Yeah. So one of the chapters in my book is entitled Media and Spectacle. And it's, to me, one of the chapters I had the most fun writing and thinking about it and thinking about. So the technologies of baseball consumption have varied over time, of course, and they have huge impact. I mean, just to take one thing that it's really different to be able to have access to a televised instant replay. Think of how much of the game that fans experience is experienced through replay, is experienced as a historical event rather than as live. I am skeptical, however, about a lot of the claims about how fundamentally different the experience of mediated fandom is from some earlier moment of live fandom. I don't think there was ever a point where the real appeal of baseball was overwhelmingly about live attendance. If baseball had not been a subject of discussion and documentation in newspapers in the 18th century, 60s and 70s, it would never have had either the appeal or the sort of recognizable character that it had in the 20th century. So there was, you know, then at the turn of that century, so the end of the 1800s, it'll be quite common for people to follow games remotely through telegraph reports. Even a telegraph newspaper officer would set up this displays with magnetic players and like lights for balls and strikes and outs. So there's always been remote attendance. There's also always been delayed attendance. Radio did make a big difference initially. A lot of major league teams tried to block radio because they thought it would depress live attendance, but it didn't have that effect. It actually probably increased live attendance and also gave baseball new sources of revenue. When television came about, there was again concern. By the time television came about, the standard view was that radio is fine. Radio like stokes interest in baseball, but television fully satisfies. It turns out based television a didn't really fully satisfy it. And anyway, now is the primary, primary medium through which people not only watch baseball, but through which people pay for baseball, essentially through which baseball is paid for. The other thing that's interesting to me is that even at the stadium, so much of the game is mediated through instant replays. So people say, oh, baseball is somehow not suited to, to generations of fans who are used to screens and mediation and asynchronous viewing. But you go to the ballpark, a lot of your access to the game really is through screen and asynchronous viewing. So all this is super interesting to me. Mediated spectatorship, both in the sense of being removed in space and being removed in time, is hugely important. And it helps us see how baseball might relate to other things, things like politics and consumption and popular entertainment. So super interesting to me. But I am a little skeptical about some of the narratives of change that get attached to that observation. Yeah, yeah.
- [41:56]
A
I don't think I realized how even the live, you know, being in the stadium, how much that experiences mediated by screens. Until I went to a Red Sox game at Fenway park last year and I sat in the outfield and if you sit in the outfield at Fenway park, you can actually see the game without really encountering a screen. And it was a very strange experience. I was. I'm so used to, you know, looking at the stats and constantly comparing and contrasting, you know, the different on base.
- [42:24]
B
Percentages and things like that and how fast the pitches. I mean, if you go to a baseball game and suddenly you realize you were deprived of something that you usually have on television or On Statcast or MLB.com, whatever, you realize how usually at the stadium, you aren't deprived of that. And you're constantly looking at the scoreboard. Right. And you're looking for information, and you're trying to figure out, oh, this guy who I've never heard of, oh, he. He bats. 173. And why are they. Why are they pitching around them? So there's a lot of that kind of viewing that takes place whether you're in the ballpark or at home. Y. Unless you're at Fenway. You're right.
- [43:01]
A
Right. Yeah. And there's a couple stadiums left that have that feeling. But at the same time, too, I think you're right. As much as it can be a nice experience because it's fun to be in a very historic ballpark at the same time, too. It's not that different. And sometimes I like watching a game on tv, sometimes I like listening to it on radio, Sometimes I like going to the game, though it can be a hassle to find parking.
- [43:25]
B
But.
- [43:28]
A
It is interesting the different ways you can experience the game. And. And. And that's part of what I enjoy about it. And, you know, you keep bringing up partisanship, and I think that this is such a. Interesting idea because I do really feel, on a personal level, like the first real partisan loyalty I ever had, it wasn't to my city or my country or my political parents, political views that they tried to instill in me. You know, my first partisan, partisan loyalty was to the New York Mets, even though I didn't even grow up in New York. And it's funny, I like other sports, and I just don't have the same care about the teams that I root for in the same way that I like the Mets. So what is it about me and so many baseball fans that are just driven to these unbelievably bizarre loyalties to our teams?
- [44:21]
B
I actually don't think it's distinctive to baseball. I think many of your listeners will be thinking, like, what do you mean? It's. The University of Michigan football team is. Is the only one I really have passionate feelings about. I'm happy to watch a basketball game or a baseball game. So I don't think it's distinctive to baseball. I think it may be related to childhood. Right. This ability to have a partisan allegiance, to avow a preference for one thing over another thing, and to have people know that you have that partisan allegiance and have some of the reflected glory or the deflected blame be associated with you, I think that's a powerful feeling. We have that. But many things we have that. About political parties. We have it about, you know, maybe our, our hometown or college alma mater or our nation or our church or, or, or our favorite band. But it's, it's easy to develop one around a popular spectator sport when you're a kid. And if you do it as a kid, it's likely to have. So I would say the exact same thing as you, Caleb. I like watching sports. I don't really, really care. I can provisionally care during a game which team we don't really, really care about. About outcomes and fates, with one colossal exception that actually bears much more resemblance to things in my life that are about politics or religion or, or personal identity. And it happens to be a baseball team. So I think that you and I have that for autobiographical reasons. And there are things about baseball that supports that, including the fact that there's so much unpredictability in a baseball game. So many things have to go right that it always seems like, oh, this easily could have gone differently. So I think it's about baseball that, that are conducive to that. But I think that if you and I, for some, some biographical reason had become attached to, to. It has to be a team sport because, because players don't have life, you know, eternal careers. But it happened to, to be for, for, for the Boston Bruins or, or, you know, I don't know, for the Atlanta Hawks, then, then we might be saying it about, about that too.
- [46:47]
A
Yeah, I think that's true. And certainly you're right. Like the, the, the fervor that people bring sometimes to the fandom around their favorite hockey team or their favorite college sports team is like truly, especially college sports. It can be unlike anything. It's kind of frightening sometimes to be in a, at a college sports game and seeing the fan, how the fans. Fans are, are reacting.
- [47:08]
B
Well, I would say that college sports have a leg up on this process because the fiction of partisan identification I talk about a little bit in the book and there's a chapter on partisanship. The fiction of fan identification does depend a little bit on the idea that the fan is a member of the team. And it is easier, despite all the things that we could say about this fiction that I'm about to name, it's easier to take seriously the fiction that you, if you went to this college especially, or if you are currently attending the college, have some kind of identity with the players because nominally they are also enrolled in the same college as you. But even, but also they wear the same, you know, their uniforms bear some relationship to your college jerseys and all that. So I think college sports have, have, have an advantage in that part of the project. Yeah. Even though the players change, like with every, with every transfer portal, so.
- [48:02]
A
Right. But you're a little bit closer if you're, you know, if you're, if you're at the school, then you're almost on the team. If you could feel.
- [48:08]
B
Exactly.
- [48:08]
A
Just all you got to do is walk on a part of baseball that I love. And this isn't unique to baseball. Like, every sport is getting, you know, is getting treated with the same saber metrics approach that baseball was revolutionized with, you know, a few decades ago, where basically ridiculous levels of granular statistical record keeping have really transformed the game. It's changed how we think about who the best players are. You know, it's changed what skills are valued. It's changed how managers manage, and it's also changed how players play and how people watch the sport. How do you see the statistical revolution in baseball as impacting the game and how we think about it?
- [48:58]
B
Okay, so there's a chapter about this too. This, you know, this might be, I think, everyone's favorite chapter because this is a thing that people liked. The book is really about how to think about baseball. And this is the aspect of baseball that both reflects and generates the most intense thinking. So everything you said in specific, I would agree with. It has transformed the way managers manage, the way fans watch, the way players play, and of course, the way skills are evaluated. I hesitate to call it a revolution. I think it's a somewhat oversimplified and misunderstood phenomenon. Baseball has always, as long as it has been a spectator sport in the United States, it has always generated an obsession with granular statistics. So that's not new. Right. I think it originates in the case of baseball in a kind of almost moral obsession with according, credit and blame to a sport that is particularly team dependent. So that's a story I tell. And I don't think the granularity or the emphasis on predicting success through statistical analysis is new. I also don't even think that the skills that are, or the strategies that are valued are as new as people think. I point out in the book the precedents for this really in the 1940s and 50s. It's just that the, the proponents of that kind of strategic thinking have succeeded in persuading more people of its legitimacy. And it is true that not necessarily computational techniques, but, but technologies of, and, and the platforms of, of making visible statistics have made it easier to win arguments with that I don't think that the data stuff is as radical as people think, but it's obviously the developments within that field are important. What I do think actually is really different is the role of video capture. There are so many things basically always wanted to have granular analysis. There's so many things that could not be granularly analyzed until we could really track and isolate at a very precise level objects in motion, especially bodies, balls and bats. So now we can talk about things that were harder to talk about with confidence 30, 40 years ago. So if there have been technological changes that have accelerated the so called sabermetric revolution, I think it's actually those technologies rather than, than computational ones. And then the fact that Major League Baseball has decided to put a lot of that stuff out, out there. So soccer teams also can track body and ball and head and foot, but it's mostly proprietary. Most that information is held proprietarily by teams in baseball. It's distributed to fans as part of the entertainment package. So that has changed. The experience of watching is that when if I can't get to the radio or television and I want to look just on my phone without any, my phone is instantly giving me all kinds of information. But the vertical break of a pitch, the exit velocity of a hit, all these things that become part of what I'm watching, depending why I'm watching the game. If I'm concerned not just about, you know, say whether the, the Mets are losing to the Pirates, but whether someone in my fantasy league is likely to perform well a week from now I might care about the exit velocity of the foul ball that he hit. Whereas a month, you know, 30 years ago I, I might not have cared for interesting reasons, but I also wouldn't have known.
- [53:12]
A
Right? Yeah, the, you know, the hard hit balls for outs, you know, those matter a lot to managers because maybe if you can just slightly adjust your, you know, your swing so you can hit it, you know, five degrees to the left, then, then you'll get a double instead of, instead of an out. So yeah, it is really interesting all of it. You know, of course there's also like, you know, there's, there's been innovations in surgery because of baseball too. You know, baseball's, baseball's impact on, you know, and relationship with math and science is a really fun, fun thing to think about. And you know, part of baseball, you know, there are these characters, you know, there's Jackie Robinson, there's, you know, there's Ty Cobb, there's, you know, there's Barry Bonds, there There, there is Babe Ruth who's, who's sort of the, you know, the legendary transformational player. And now we have, we have Shohei Ohtani who, who you know is, is arguably the best player today. Aaron Judge sometimes, you know, takes the crown from him depending on the year. But sh. Oh, Ohtani is one of these transformational players because he's doing something that hasn't been done in a very long time, which is he, he can both pitch and hit and, and not just pitch and hit. He does them both, you know, at elite levels. And I think he's also done such an incredible job of just transforming how people think about baseball. You, you have a line in it that there were more people in Japan watching the 2024 World Series than there were watching in America, which is really remarkable to think about. How is someone like Shohei Ohtani and, and this sort of the new crop, the new faces of baseball, how are they changing the game and changing how we think about, you know, this pastime that in the American mythos is the American pastime. It is the American sport now. You know, with, with international players.
- [55:00]
B
It's, it's been Japanese national team sport for, for over a century as, as well and, and Cuba for, for even longer. So it is, it is, it is the so called American pastime. But I don't think America is the only one who can claim that, you know, as, as a, as a baseball fan, as opposed to my role in this book, I am interested in what might make Shohei Ohtani different as a, as a two way player. But in the history of baseball or thinking about baseball, I don't actually think that that makes, makes much of a difference. But the other thing does, which is that Shohei Ohtani represents not the development that there are all these Japanese players in the major leagues because I point out in the book there actually been many, many more American Dominican players playing in the Japanese league despite really strict quotas on their, on rostering them than there are been Japanese players in the major leagues. That's not the big deal. I think the big deal is about fandom is that, is that Major League Baseball has cultivated and is benefiting from vast international fandom and Shohei Ohtani has played a large role in that because from a Japanese perspective the fact that the best baseball player in what I would say, you know, really is like the, the counterpart to the NBA, right again, an internationally popular sport with a consensus best professional league located in the U.S. that's what the Major League Baseball has become too. So Showing a Japanese player is the best player in MLB makes Major League Baseball appealing and relevant to lots of international audiences. And a lot of Major League Baseball's revenue and popularity is based on its global appeal. And I would say the same thing. I talk about this a fair amount in the book. In the case of. Of Latinx players in Major League Baseball in the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. That is interesting and has that impact on American attitudes toward immigration and race and color and language. But it has also cemented a very powerful connection between Latino Latina fans in the U.S. and major league Baseball. People often say, oh, you know, baseball is declining in popularity. And people often say, oh, and it's really declining in popularity among black Americans, but it is rising and extremely avidly supported in the United States by. By Chicana and Latino Americans. So, yeah, so all of these things are connected. And the book is much more interested in the way in fans and in spectatorship than it is on what happens on the field. The book's called out of the Ballpark and is really, in every thematic chapter trying to get people to think that what's important is not whether this guy pitches and hits or this guy broke a record, or this guy is really fast. That's not where it's happening. It's happening around questions of race and gender and politics and entertainment and law. Because so much of what makes baseball baseball is not. Is not on the field. I mean, it's in conversations like the one that you and I are having. It's in memories that we have about its relationship to our life. It's in metaphors that it generates for talking about other things. And it's in making us think about what it means to be a modern spectator in a mass society.
- [58:56]
A
Yeah, it is really interesting to see the impact, the cultural impact of certain players. Obviously Shoe Ohtani's impact on Japanese fandom. You know, in a place like, like New York City where you have Francisco Lindor, who's Puerto Rican, there's a huge Puerto Rican community here that loves him and rallies behind him. Not just Puerto Ricans. I mean, all Mets fans love Francisco Lindor. But it's interesting.
- [59:18]
B
And where you grew up, I would say Fernando Valens a big role. And this plays out in things like, you know, the Dodgers back and forth about, about whether to let ice into this stadium is part of this. This, you know, this very complicated relationship that, that the, The Dodgers have with their Chicano fan base for. For whom they are like a central icon. Anyway, that's A whole other story.
- [59:45]
A
Yeah, right. We could go into, probably talk ad nauseam about the. The political implications of baseball fandom because it is an interesting sport. I remember I did see a statistic recently that I think. I think baseball is of the American sports. It's the, you know, the one that, that leans the more. A little bit more conservative in terms of American fan base. You know, other sports like basketball, like, lean, much more liberal or.
- [60:11]
B
Okay, but football is complicated. Football.
- [60:14]
A
Yeah, football has got football. I don't want to. Yeah, football has gotten very complicated in the past.
- [60:18]
B
And we're not going to talk about NASCAR either, right?
- [60:20]
A
Yes.
- [60:20]
B
No, no, I forgot about professional or professional wrestling.
- [60:23]
A
Yeah, well, I guess I was thinking of the major. Well, I'm sorry. I'm sure NASCAR fans will probably be in my inbox if there are any. But yeah, it's interesting to see that. And I think also, you know, you know, baseball is it. It's hard to, to. To talk about or think about baseball too much without getting into, you know, politics and contemporary issues, you know, getting into labor issues. And I think that's what's so interesting about sports. Like, baseball is like when you start to talk about it or think about it with putting your, you know, maybe your historian hat on, you start to see that you can talk about basically everything through the lens of. Of baseball. You can talk about developments in math and you can talk about all sorts of things. So.
- [61:06]
B
But I would just say that. And that's true for theater and for film and for. And from. For music also. So, you know, the book tries to point out ways in which the distinctive history or even the distinctive structure of the game has contributed to the fact that you can think about everything while thinking about baseball. But it's not making the claim that baseball is unique in that regard. And I do think that in that sense, it's really an argument for the need to think about popular culture and mass consumption and mass media and the things that we watch for pleasure as always being bound up with things that we think of as more serious.
- [61:49]
A
So my last question, and this is one that I've asked past people that I've interviewed who have written books on baseball, is if you could make a prediction on who you think is going to win the World Series this year.
- [62:00]
B
Well, it would be a little silly not to bet against your hometown, your former hometown Dodgers, given, Given their payroll. But I like the fact that typically it's not. It's not exactly who you think it's going to be. I don't know, among long shots that might be pleasing to see when the World Series. How about the Seattle Mariners?
- [62:30]
A
So, yeah, that's you know, I call Cal Raleigh. They've got a nice team, so, yeah.
- [62:35]
B
It'S possible they just added the great Brendan Donovan.
- [62:39]
A
So. Yeah. Yeah. Betting against the Dodgers, you know, we'll see if maybe there'll be a lockout in the near future and there'll be another another chapter that you can add on the labor, labor versus ownership disputes because it's getting it's getting a little out of hand, though, you know, I'm very happy for all my Dodger fan friends. Dodger friend fan fans. Yeah. Yeah. So, David, it was really wonderful to get the chance to talk to you about.
- [63:01]
B
I really liked it.