Arguably, David Henkin’s new book has been in the works since he declared his allegiance to the St. Louis Cardinals at 7 years old, a team he lived nowhere near and had no family ties to. Today, Henkin is a UC Berkeley history professor who has researched and taught on subjects as diverse as Broadway, marriage and the origin of the seven-day week. His work on political party loyalty in the 1800s eventually led him to cataloguing a very different form of partisanship — baseball fandom.
Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball, published earlier this month, provides an overview of how the sport has evolved since 1845, when baseball’s rules were first formally laid out by New York’s Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. Instead of breathlessly recounting the sport’s greatest moments and players, Out of the Ballpark is “a cultural exploration,” Henkin said, that uses baseball as a window into changes in American culture over time. Each chapter follows different themes over the sport’s nearly 200-year history, such as its connection to masculine ideals, race issues and the “spectacle” of attending a game.
Today, fans fret that developments like the advent of sports betting or robot umpires have irrevocably changed the game they love. But tracing baseball’s history showed Henkin that such changes are not, in fact, unprecedented. Instead, they’re the latest fluctuations in a long history of transformation. He chronicles how Black players fought for entrance into the major leagues in the 1900s as well as today’s decline in African American fans and players. And he points out that the now-textbook “three strikes, four balls” rule wasn’t formally adopted until 1889, when baseball was already well-established.