The Love of Baseball: Essays by Lifelong Fans ed. by Chris Arvidson and Diana Nelson Jones (review)

The Love of Baseball contains thirty short essays that describe, to quote the back cover of the book, “how [the authors] found a passion for the sport and how their relationship to it changed over the years.” Love is also much more than that. All of its essays reveal how baseball has marked and shaped the relationships the authors have with the most important people in their lives.

If you’re reading this review, then you’ve probably heard John Thorn— or someone paraphrasing him— say that baseball is not only about what happens on the field, it’s about who we were with when it happened. So, too, the essays in The Love of Baseball are about who the authors were with as baseball “happened” in their lives. As a result, the essays transcend specific places, times, and favorite teams, making it easy for the reader to relate to the stories they contain.

Love describes relationships with friends and family, teammates and teachers. While some even involve imagined relationships with ballplayers and broadcasters (see, e.g., “Meet My Best Friend, John Hiller”), each essay ultimately touches on our most meaningful and intimate relationships. Through the eyes of the thirty authors, we remember how baseball connects us to each other in our daily lives and throughout a lifetime of shared events: birth days, birthdays and deaths; starting school, finishing school, and skipping school; first jobs, dream jobs and long vacations from jobs; courtships, weddings and divorces. Again and again, we are shown how baseball is inextricably woven into the life stories of its fans across major life events and, frequently, spanning generations. “Our affinity for St. Louis is one of the threads that holds our family together” (63).

Even when baseball appears to attain spiritual significance, quotidian relationships transcend the supernatural. Joseph Bathanti waxes metaphysical when he claims, “[Maz’s] home run remains one of the mileposts of my consciousness, a Station of the Cross … the Burning Bush; or The Feast of the Epiphany” (151). Despite initial appearances, however, Bathanti is not offering the familiar characterization of baseball as the sacred that contrasts with the profane of our day-to-day lives (see, e.g., “Dark as a Dungeon: Coal Country Baseball”). Rather, his descriptions relate to the way his aging father recounted the young Joseph’s role in Maz’s home run. It reminds us that baseball not only connects us to each other, it connects us to each other as we once were—and in this case, as we wish we had been. As another author notes, “When [Hazewood] died, I was 13 again for a moment, sitting in the sun and listening to my grandmother sing” (89).

And because baseball has such power in our relationships, it is natural that some of us will to extend baseball’s power over us to the ability to repair broken relationships:

[Our dad] and our mom separated over a year ago, but playing baseball together seems to remind him how much fun it is to be a family. I know he would be proud if I made the team. Maybe he would even come home for good so he could see the week-day games.

(18)

Baseball even has the power to touch those who are not necessarily fans of the game. One essay, written by a “yet-to-be fan,” describes a special bond between a father and son:

After milking the cows and putting them away for the evening, they climbed in the pick-up truck and headed out, listening to the play-by-play on the radio. But Holly Hill fell behind, so they headed home. Then their team surged, so they turned around and headed toward the game again. I do not know if they ever got there.

(167)

Ultimately, it seems to matter less whether or not we actually “get there.” Our love of baseball is bound...