David M. Henkin

The Week - The wide angle
May 3, 2023

Historians traffic in timekeeping, and time is the fundamental building block of historical scholarship, whether we are telling stories about change, persistence, sequence, or simultaneity. So in a way, books...

The Week - In a nutshell
May 3, 2023

This is a book about how we experience and imagine time. Although treatments of that subject often focus on the clock, modern time consciousness is organized around calendars as well....

The Week - A close-up
May 3, 2023

I wrote the book’s preface in the expectation that it would draw a potential reader into a deceptively familiar subject. The global shutdown in 2020 exposed all sorts of odd...

Out of the Ballpark – In a nutshell
August 18, 2026

What does it actually mean to say baseball "means" something? A case for dropping the tired clichés about national character and instead treating the game as an object of inquiry—one whose meanings accumulated over time, across North America, East Asia, and the Caribbean, and alongside every other form of modern mass entertainment.

Out of the Ballpark – In a nutshell

Baseball, we often hear, is more than just a game – it has meaning. But what does it mean? The most familiar answers repeat clichés that don't withstand scrutiny. Both those blinded by insiders' love of the sport and those mystified from afar by its inscrutability or its apparent tedium claim that baseball is a unique pastime that captures something about the character of the United States. But baseball is popular is many places beyond U.S. borders. And other spectator sports are currently more popular than baseball among Americans. My book discards the assumption that baseball possesses some inherent character – along with the assumption that American culture is a distinct and coherent entity that could be faithfully and meaningfully encapsulated in a sport. Instead I look at the different ways it has accumulated meaning over time, in multiple locales and cultural settings, and in relation to other kinds of commercial entertainment.

Out of the Ballpark adopts a wide lens, focusing on professional baseball in North America, East Asia, and the Caribbean. It moves thematically, exploring professional baseball's ambivalent relationship to city life, its gender and racial politics, its obsession with statistics, its historical dependence on media and communications technology, the geography of its spread, and numerous other topics, highlighting in each case both the things that distinguish baseball from other spectacles and the things that mark baseball as a typical – even prototypical – modern entertainment enterprise.

Rather than dwelling on the personalities and achievements of baseball players or the sport's iconic moments, as so many compelling books about baseball have done, Out of the Ballpark takes a step back and asks readers, whether they are engaged fans or bemused strangers, to treat baseball as an object of intellectual inquiry – something to think about and with – and as a springboard for making sense of other aspects of mass entertainment and modern life.

Ongoing thread. More from David M. Henkin to follow.
Curator: Bora Pajo
August 18, 2026

Henkin, D. M. (2026). Out of the ballpark: How to think about baseball. Oxford University Press.

David M. Henkin

David Henkin is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches about the social and cultural history of the United States. He is the author of numerous books, including The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are.

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