Death at the Ballpark: More Than 2,000 Game-Related Fatalities of Players, Other Personnel and Spectators in Amateur and Professional Baseball, 1962–2014 by Robert M. Gorman and David Weeks (review)

In baseball, errant pitches and wild throws, whether intentional or not, have the capacity to hurt, injure, and even kill people. Players have only worn helmets for a little over sixty years, so it should come as no surprise that players occasionally experienced extreme injuries. But for someone actually to die? One would assume that to be exceedingly rare. However, as shown in the updated volume of Death at the Ballpark, fatalities have been sadly common at baseball games for over 150 years, and not just players—fans, umpires, and coaches die too.

This book is, first and foremost, a reference work of baseball-related fatalities. However, it is far more than a simple spreadsheet of death. Gorman and Weeks provide vignettes and sources for each entry. These vignettes, which often include quotes from primary sources, provide a brief glimpse into the past and help bring these macabre moments—about two thousand in total—to life. Death at the Ballparkis divided into chapters delineated by cause of death and into sections based on who actually died (player, other baseball officials, and fans). Each chapter is further divided into sections based on league, including major leagues, minor leagues, and amateurs. Gorman and Weeks understandably separated preintegration African American baseball fatalities from other leagues because “of the historical interest in the game as played in segregated America” (3). Most fatalities are “action-related,” meaning thrown balls, collisions, or crowd violence, but authors also include those related to other conditions such as weather, field conditions, and health problems, such as undetected heart conditions.

Printed sources are the primary base for this work, especially national publications such as Sporting News, Baseball Magazine, and dozens of large- city newspapers like the New York Times, while local history groups, baseball history groups, and about a dozen online archives served critical roles. Gorman and Weeks were highly critical of sources as well, and, as both are librarians, they are well positioned to be so. They favored local sources if and when a discrepancy between sources appeared.

Death at the Ballparkis an excellent reference resource for any research into baseball and sport fandom. Other historians may find this work useful because of Gorman and Weeks’s vignettes and narratives. The authors view their book as all of these things, but also as evidence that organized baseball must take safety (especially fan safety) more seriously at a major league level. However, the second edition of this volume is still lacking a solid conclusion to make sense of such an extensive necrology. The authors missed a significant opportunity to draw connections between baseball’s history of death to broader sport health concerns, such as the ongoing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) crisis. This could have greatly strengthened their work by displaying baseball’s slow progress by adopting helmets, better catcher’s gear, and screens to protect fans. Regardless, Death at the Ballparkis a quality reference work and should have a place on the shelves of all historians researching connections between sport, violence, and safety.