As part of our continuing effort to turn our shop into St. Louis’s baseball book headquarters, we invite you to join us on the evening of Thursday, March 26 (after the Cardinals home opener) to hear from David Henkin, author of Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball.

If you’d like to reserve a copy for pickup during the event, order here.

About the book: Out of the Ballpark strips away the mythology that has accumulated around baseball in the United States to better appreciate the different sites of the sport's development and the various sources of its appeal. It explores baseball's function as a modern entertainment spectacle and moves across time and space to examine its history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. Henkin takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball's rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball's significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. Here, we are shown how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.

About the author: David Henkin has taught U.S. history at the University of California, Berkeley, for the past three decades. For far longer, and for no apparent biographical reason, he has rooted passionately for the St. Louis Cardinals. Henkin is the author of five books, including The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are.