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.
Oxford University Press
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.
The book contains nuggets for fun-fact lovers, too: Did you know that famous Bay Area Beat poet Jack Kerouac tracked a makeshift baseball fantasy league in personal notebooks for decades? Or that second baseman Charlie Grant unsuccessfully attempted to become the first Black player in the American League in 1901 by claiming to be Cherokee, since some Indigenous and Latino players had been allowed to compete?
This month, from an office where two baseballs have a place of pride on his bookshelf, Henkin answered questions about baseball's past and present, its global footprint and whether technological advances have really altered the game.
UC Berkeley News: Baseball is nicknamed "America's pastime." Would you say baseball is really a uniquely American sport?
David Henkin: As a spectator sport, it is indigenously American - it originated here. That doesn't mean it's uniquely American; it's obviously not. I'd estimate that more people outside of the United States than inside it have followed or watched a baseball game in the last year.
George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress
For most of baseball's history in the United States as a spectator sport, it has also thrived somewhere else. Cuba is the most significant example. Baseball in Cuba goes back to its colonial period and is older than the National League. Japan also has a very long history of baseball. So I don't know how anyone can think it's uniquely American in that sense.
People who argue that baseball conveys something about the unique character of the United States lose me, because I don't think they all necessarily agree with one another about what it expresses. Some of those ideas, as I point out in the book, are contradictory. Some say baseball is about individual success, and that's why it's American. Some say it's about teamwork, and that's why. Some say it's about punctuality and precision; others, about living off the clock and not caring. I'm fairly skeptical about reducing the meaning and the character of baseball to any one thing, and unless you do that, it's also harder to say there is a reason why it is an exceptionally or characteristically American sport.
In the book, you identify three "empires" of baseball, spheres of influence originating from the U.S., Cuba and Japan. Why did baseball take root in some places but not others?
Focusing on international relations in the 19th century explains more than analyzing whether the game itself was appealing. On the island of Hispaniola, you have the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic, which is one of the dominant sites of professional baseball play. Every major league team now has an academy there for school-aged players to discover the sport's next star. On the other side of the island in Haiti, baseball doesn't even register. In that case, it really is about French and Spanish, and the longstanding relationship that people in the Dominican Republic had to Cuban media, which people in Haiti did not share.
American soft power is a big part of baseball's expansion, but it's not the whole explanation. Baseball was popular in Cuba long before the island gained independence in the Spanish-American War, and it was in Japan long before occupation, military conquest or the large-scale arrival of American business interests.
What's the history of baseball's fascination with statistics like batting averages?
Henry Chadwick was a British-born sportswriter whose family moved to New York when he was young. Originally a cricket journalist, he became enchanted by baseball and played a large role in shaping the sport, its statistical culture and its rules in the mid-19th century.
His own obsessions and even his own moral agenda influenced several aspects of the statistical culture. Chadwick was very interested in assigning credit or blame to individuals, despite the fact that a win is an outcome in which individuals don't play as obvious a role. At the time, the pitcher's job was principally to enable a hit rather than to prevent it, so the major ways in which we now think of baseball as allowing one player to dominate the game were not really on his radar. He was watching a game in which people do little things, both as fielders and as hitters, and they add up to an outcome, but he thought you needed to know which individual did well and which individual did poorly. As I explained in the book, it was part of a larger Protestant middle-class understanding of the moral responsibility of the individual and his general concern with masculine self-control and discipline.
He also was a big believer, as many reformers were in the 19th century, in the power of statistics to achieve social reform goals. To him, everything needed to be recorded, with meticulous attention paid to mathematically accurate, precise statistics. Even though the batting average is routinely disparaged these days, it remains the first statistic in any broadcast. The batting average is something he really championed. He believed it's important to know how many hits out of how many legitimate opportunities someone struck, irrespective of the magnitude of the hit, because he wanted to decide which individuals should be praised or blamed for the team's performance.
There's a section of your book on the complicated relationship between baseball and race. What are key points you think people should know, beyond the story of Jackie Robinson?
Public domain
Black Americans played professional baseball in the 19th century, really until the end of Reconstruction. There were taboos about it; I would emphasize that taboos against Black performance in spectator sports were different for individual sports than for team sports. There was much more room for a Black pedestrian, like foot racer Frank Hart, or a Black boxer than for a Black baseball player, because baseball was a club sport, a fraternal sport. Ideas about the relationship between the men in a club brought to the surface impulses for racist exclusion.
When Black baseball players were effectively eliminated, it was the players rather than the fans or the management who were largely responsible. Their ideas about manly honor and what it meant to belong to a club were typically just beneath the surface of whatever they said or did to exclude Black players.
Out of the Ballpark traces the oscillations of different aspects of baseball culture, from urban migrations to gender norms. Were there issues that stood out as either remarkably consistent throughout time or, on the other hand, as areas of significant change?
The rhetorical thrust of the book is to emphasize continuity in the face of frequent exaggerations of change. I try to point out the things that are genuinely changing, but almost every theme I trace in the book is a very long story.
I would never diminish the significance of the immense transformation in the composition of Major League Baseball teams with the arrival of players from the Caribbean and now also from East Asia. That's different.
Public domain
The idea that it's no longer just about attending the game, but it's now about all these other things, numbers or gambling - all those components have always been there.
The tendency has been, in the last 10 or 20 years, to suggest that baseball's rules have rendered the game unrecognizable. I just don't think that's true. A lot of the biggest rule changes took place in the 19th century, not in the 20th or the 21st. In this book, I tend to show how perceived dramatic changes are less dramatic, sometimes because they have antecedents or echoes, because the change doesn't alter the fundamental thing or because it's not really a change at all.
The conventional view is that the big change in baseball is: "The suits have taken over and they all got math degrees at Yale, and now data science runs baseball. In the 20th century, we didn't have that technology or outlook." I argue that's not exactly true, that it's not quite as different. However, the technologies that allow us to track the ball in motion change many, many things about how people watch the game. Although I didn't write about the Automated Ball-Strike feature, which is being introduced in a limited way in Major League Baseball this season to dispute high-stakes calls, it is a good example of how technology has the capacity to change not only how the game is played but how it is evaluated, perceived and experienced.
What was the most fun you had researching the book?
Probably going to see the Hanshin Tigers in Osaka, especially trying to figure out how to scalp tickets when I was told no one resells tickets there. The game was sold out. Then one very, very drunk person took me down an alley - I had no idea if this was a smart thing to do - but I bought tickets, and they were legit.
In Japan, the stadium culture is a bit more like college football in the United States - major cheering sections with their own percussion and brass instruments play throughout the game. The tickets turned out to be right in the official cheering section of the home team, so it was extremely lively and fun.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
