The Cheap Seats: A Note from the Editor

I originally started writing this introduction to the journal on my flight back to Nashville from Phoenix, where we’d just wrapped up the twenty-ninth annual NINE Spring Training Conference in early March 2022. After a year of Zoom presentations, we were back in person for the conference, comprised of three days of presentations on all things baseball. It began with an opening night session showcasing two amazing artists who shared their insights on baseball and visual arts: illustrator and author Anika Orrock and photographer Jean Fruth. Three nights later we closed out the conference, as we usually do, with SABR presenting the Seymour Medal to the best book of baseball history or biography from the previous year. This year the prize went to Steve Treder for his terrific biography on former Giants owner Horace Stoneham.

Thanks to a commissioner who seems to care very little for the game he oversees, there were no spring training games to attend in Phoenix. Quite frankly the lockout seemed as though it might last well into the season, as the first week’s games had already been postponed. And with the minor leaguers not yet playing, there were none of those games to attend either. Even the local college teams, Arizona State and Grand Canyon University, were out of town. Some of us began to wonder if the baseball gods were against us after all.

But determined to see some type of live game, a small group of us grabbed a box of grilled hot dogs and attended a game between Paradise Valley Community College and Mesa Community College. As it turns out, Rob Manfred wasn’t going to ruin the week after all.

Shortly after I returned home, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced an agreement with the players had been struck, and they would be reporting to spring training in a matter of days. Almost immediately people on social media and the talking heads on sports talk shows began saying, “Baseball’s back,” as though MLB was the only option available for fans. The funny thing is, in the preceding weeks, there had already been an increase in people who began posting about attending their first college games. Some in our group at the conference watched their first, and hopefully not last, juco game. Others were excited about the upcoming high school season, which was now just two weeks away.

After the past two years, a time in which much of the world was dealing with COVID-19, this year’s conference was a welcome reminder that baseball can serve as a pretty good distraction from things like a pandemic, political unrest, social strife, and economic uncertainty. No, baseball doesn’t fix any of these things, nor is it as important, but it gives us something to watch, enjoy, discuss, and even argue over while everything else in the world can seem to be upside down.

Putting together this collection, the first single issue after a long run of double issues, has been interesting. The pieces you hold in this collection represent much of what we love about the game. The game has inspired writers and artists almost since the first pitch was thrown at the first game. You will see this in the poems from Earl J. Wilcox, Rick Burton, and Aaron Belz. More than anything, the game is interesting because of the people who play it. The pieces in the “Triple Play” section are filled with stories about and tributes to the players who have made this game have such a rich history, including a team you’ve probably never heard of from a small town in New York and well-known names like Ted Williams and Bill Lee. And the scholarly, research-based pieces never cease to amaze me with both their variety and their substance. David Krell’s piece on Danny Kaye sent me into the black hole of YouTube, for far longer than I will admit, as I looked for interviews with the former Mariners owner. Joseph Eaton’s work on the Ladies’ Day promotions at Wrigley Field gives a glimpse into the...