Books and Baseball

Several weeks ago, in sync with the start of Major League Baseball’s 2025 season, the University of Nebraska Press published David Krell’s 1978: Baseball and America in the Disco Era. It is the third such volume Krell has done, following 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK (2021) and Do You Believe in Magic? Baseball and America in the Groundbreaking Year of 1966 (2022). If you are a heavy reader of baseball books, especially one old enough to actually remember the years 1962, 1966, and 1978, on and off the diamond, you should check Krell’s books out. They are workmanlike, while at the same time conveying a longstanding passion for baseball. And the notion of zeroing in on a particular year in this way has an inherent appeal (for this reader, at least), even if the choices of what to focus on in the culture at large tend to be scattershot, only intermittently productive of insight.

As I was reading the latest volume, I began to imagine a writer who, inspired by Krell’s example, set out to make notes for a book that would treat the 2025 season in a similar fashion, a “history of the present.” Part of the fun would be the open-endedness of the project. Rather than mining the archives (including the “archive” of personal memory), the writer would be documenting the season as it unfolded. And the same would be true when our author shifted focus from the ballpark to “the culture at large.”

If I had commissioning power (as an acquiring editor working for a good publisher), I would look for a writer who had the requisite qualities to take this on (and who would relish doing so). He or she would have to be a knowledgeable fan, of course, but also one capable of crafting interesting sentences.

The start of this season, in Japan, with the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers, is an irresistible point of departure. As I have recounted on other occasions, my brother, Rick, and I were living in Pomona, California, when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958. We became passionate fans, listened to Vin Scully on the radio, and saw many games together at Dodger Stadium. When I was hired by Christianity Today International to get Books & Culture rolling (it became at the time the thirteenth magazine in the CT stable), Wendy and I and the kids found ourselves in the Midwest, in Wheaton, Illinois, and I became a Cubs fan (while still retaining to this day a love for the Dodgers, though I do root for the Cubs when the two teams meet).

When this season started, I thought of my ten-year-old self in the summer of 1958. Back then, I couldn’t have even begun to imagine all the changes in baseball and America and the world at large in the decades that have followed. In those days I knew the year 2025 only via science fiction (laughably off in its “predictive” aspect, for the most part, yet not entirely so). But again, what a perfect opening for our imaginary book the season-opening series in Japan would provide.

In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that a book such as I have described—perhaps different in some respects, but along the same lines—already has been green-lit! The gigantic contracts, the changing place of Major League Baseball in the public imagination (in some respects significantly diminished since 1958, say), the gutting of so many minor league franchises across the country (see, for example, Will Bardenwerper’s just-published chronicle Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America), the greatly reduced numbers of kids simply playing baseball as a matter of course: all this and more is part of the story.

We can hope that this imagined book will come to fruition. And if it does, I will certainly devote a column to it.