Author: fartheroffthewall

“The Ballpark and Beyond:
An Illustrated Celebration of
Baseball’s Rich History”

The author: Todd Radom
The details: Sports Publishing/Skyhorse/Simon & Schuster, 248 pages, $29.99, to be released May 26, ’26
The links: The publisher, the author, Bookshop.org

A review in 90 feet or less:

So, whatta you think about the newest Geffen Playhouse?

That’s our playful referencing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new $724 million addition, the Geffen Galleries, opened to the public as of May 4. It took 20 years of planning and six years of construction. It took going back to the drawing board, a lot of patience and persistence, and a city’s open-mindedness to add something this miraculous on the Miracle Mile.

A rule-bending, disorienting design brings us:

== A Peter Zumthor creation that’s been compared to a “concrete blob.” And a “concrete sandwich.” And a “concrete cow-paddy.” And a “concrete amoeba.” One even went so far as to call it “The Great Los Angeles Turd.” The New York Times called it “uplifting, lyrical and pugnacious.” The Wall Street Journal called it “a work of furious originality and ambition.”

== Counter-initiative floor-to-ceiling windows to draw in all the “urban light,” but if you’re really having a moody day, just draw the metal curtains.

== Cold, and cool, dungeon-like rooms to display an eclectic arrangement spanning Van Gogh to Ansel Adams to Diego Rivera among its 2,000 pieces, with far more awaiting in storage.

== A scrumptious 30-foot-span pedestrian overpass bridging Wilshire Boulevard, which might seem unnecessary until you park yourself on one of the benches and feel levitated over the mindless Door Dash traffic flow below.

== Its own Erewhon cafe. Drink, presented in art form. So why not?

If one dares to call it polarizing, another insists it’s a “petri dish for experimental design.” And, oh the social media photo ops. TimeOut Los Angeles has put in the time to offer the 10-most photogenic things to see, as you angle to get a litter of tar-soaked Saber-Toothed Cats in the background with the proper aperture. Bravo, Pleistocene megafauna.

Don’t spin your wheels here on Superlative Alley. Cruise through if you’re over in that part of the freeway-free grid. Because, as you may know, art always brings serendipitous joy and rhythm to one’s spirits, especially if you’re experiencing May Gray, heading into June Gloom.

Raise the bar, too, when art is mashed up with anything sporty.

Not to paint ourselves into a divergent corner here, but …

I was stumped for ways to size up the latest amazing graphic art-meets-well-researched story presentation that Todd Radom has created and, seeking enlightenment and inspiration, I took an artistic side trip. I decided to contact him directly and flip this on him for a moment of glee.

During an email exchange, I asked Radom if he had seen the new collection of published work by LJ Rader called “Art But Make it Sports: Where Art and Sports Collide” (Chronicle Books, 176 pages, $18.95, released March 16, ’26.) This book is deserving, perhaps, of its own review amidst these new baseball books. But I wanted Radom’s take on it first.

“LJ Rader is brilliant — the guy is a genius, seriously,” Radom said. “I took art history classes in college and I’m married to a trained art historian, but his photographic memory and knowledge of art is striking, funny, and unique.”

Radam said he first connected with Radar on social media “when I conflated the Astros’ World Series scandal and The Ashcan School, the early 20th century art movement that depicted urban scenes with dark, gritty realism. I think ‘Art But Make it Sports’ is the only forum where you can include ‘ashcan’ and ‘trash can’ and connect artist John Sloan to the 2017 Astros.”

What Radam appreciates most about Rader is how he has “a unique brain. A layman who is interested in art and has the ability to retain shapes, colors, composition … all toward fun! We need more of that!”

So while that may seem like the perfect endorsement for Rader when his book goes to paperback — but, resist if possible — it’s also interesting to us that a review of “Art But Make It Sports” in the New York Times/The Athletic provoked Keith Law to write in the lead: “LJ Rader is the genius behind” … and then went on to explain how this project started on Instagram in 2019 and then bled over into Bluesky, and here’s a Q&A with the gentleman.

Another sidenote: Wasn’t it Rader who was responsible for seizing on a photo of a 2019 home-plate scuffle featuring Cincinnati Reds hitter Yasiel Puig taking on a hoard of yellow-clad Pittsburgh Pirates and suggesting it looked like some Renaissance battle painting? Somehow, we just assumed it was him — but then, there wasn’t an actual painting that the photo mimicked. Was there?

Cincy Shirts, a Cincinnati-based apparel company, seems to have commissioned a faux version of the moment to look like a Renaissance era work and dubbed it “El Guerrero Rojo” — aka, the Red Warrior — then slapped it on T-shirts. Puig then wore it out in public.

For the acuteness, perspicacity, inventiveness and a soothing virtuosity Radom pours into this latest work, it’s not a surprise we’ve come to link it to all sorts of other inspiring sports/art mashups lately.

When we caught wind that Radom produced “The Ballpark and Beyond” — and immediately paid up to get a signed copy — our expectations were a bit lofty after embracing his previous work, “Winning Ugly: A Visual History of Baseball’s Most Unique Uniforms” (Skyhorse Publishing, 184 pages, $19.99 paperback, released 2018). Our review at the time noted Radom had put together something that was “uniformly superior to anything we’ve seen like this before.”

When he did “Fabric of the Game: The Stories Behind the NHL’s Names, Logos and Uniforms” with Chris Creamer, Radom could expand more on this imaginative merger of imagery and verbiage.

This time, combining 150 original illustrations to go with his own 75,000-plus words, Radom creates 75 unique entries to soak in for all they’re worth. He goes off on appreciations of the game’s origins, its personalities, the quirky equipment, strange-but-true happening — leading the reader into his climactic wheelhouse, the “Hall of Jerseys,” under the umbrella of “The Look of the Game.”

If the purpose of this is, as Radom writes in his intro, to spark “introspection, discussion and curiosity … how can you not be intellectually curious about baseball?” — please indulge us in that exercise as we have our top half-dozen playlist of what resonated most with us:

“How Retrosheet Saved Baseball”

The author: Jay Wigley
The details: Wiglesius Press/self published, 228 pages, $27.99 hardcover, $19.99 paperback, released April 3, ‘26
The links: The author, Bookshop.org

A review in 90 feet or less:

Probably no surprise we again seek clarity on how baseball followers value statistical bookkeeping by referencing the work of David M. Henkin’s “Out of the Park: How to Think About Baseball.” Just as we did during Day 12 with sizing up the historical context of Robert Coover’s “The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.” in relation to how the game encourages fantasy and imagination.

From Chapter 11 of Henkin’s horsehide observations:

“Baseball’s culture of obsessive statistical reckoning combines several related elements (that) have been intensified in the case of baseball by the game’s structure and the sport’s history. First is an interest in evaluating and crediting the contributions of individual players to a team’s success or failure. Second is an extraordinary faith in the capacity of numbers to precisely and reliably summarize important events. And third is a need to tell stories about the game in a language that allows for comparing events spread across time.

“The careful recording and tabulating of events within a baseball game, including events that don’t directly determine or explain the game’s outcome, has been around ever since the game became a subject of news coverage.”

And much of that were from seeds planted by Henry Chadwick, a cricket reporter from England who moved to New York in 1830, watched this odd game of baseball being played in the 1850s, reported on it for New York newspapers, and knew it needed some structure when he fleshed out what’s generally accepted as the box score and scoresheet.

A note-taking grid with codes and slashes and numbers and letters that could be a universal language was to everyone’s best interest. We find out that Chadwick’s reliance on this fact came from learning how his older half-brother, a commissioner of the board of health in Britain, saw the collected data as a scientific approach to create social order and accountability.

“It is remarkable how well documented baseball games were,” Henkin writes. “We have more detailed, exhaustive and reliable information about what happened on baseball fields over a century ago than about any other aspect of leisure culture, popular entertainment or daily life in the United States from that era.”

For better, or worse? For better, of course.

History also needs checks and double-checks on accuracy to avoid narrative pitfalls. In baseball, there is a human element that determines hits and errors, writing rules about how a pitcher is credited with a win or a loss or save on his ledger. Humans make mistakes and stand to be corrected. Numbers should have auditing.

Box scores provide that data record, transmission and storage.

And in the 21^st Century, thank goodness for Retrosheet.

“Ford Frick: Baseball’s Third Commissioner
And His Four Decades of Shaping the Game”

The author: Dave Bohmer
The details: University of Nebraska Press, 416 pages, $39.95, released April 1, ’26
The links: The publisher, Bookshop.org

“A League of His Own:
A. G. Spalding and
The Business of Baseball”

The author: Mark A. Stein
The details: Lyons Press, 352 pages, $39.95; released Jan. 6, ’26
The links: The publisher, the author, Bookshop.org

A review in 90 feet or less:

Americans, by and large, bi or straight, show an unreasonable hesitancy in electing a woman to hold the role as president of the United States.

Given the option of a credible female over an autocratic, nihilistic, narcissistic mad man, recent history disappointingly shows that if it could be called a “perfect storm” aberration the first time, there was an unfathomable repeat performance to come.

Claims that “the people have spoken” as a result of a general abstention of the majority deciding there was a “lesser of two evils” argument that played out was just what we’d have to accept.

Major League Baseball is primed for its own commander in chief decision sooner than later. It can, if it wants, help change some generalized thinking about leadership of America’s pastime — or what’s left of it — doesn’t have to be selected from the sausage factory of candidates.

When Rob Manfred has the expiration date of his MLB commissioner contract occur in 2029, he says he’ll be done. A top-tier dame is not only waiting in the wings, but she’s openly campaigning.

Leave it to Jane Leavy (pronounced LEV-y) to come up with the most no-nonsense manifesto — womanifesto? — of how and why baseball can be great again with her late fall 2025 book, “Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fit It” (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, $32.50 — although stupidly available on Amazon.com for 77 percent off, so please don’t chase it down there).

The Long Island broadsider, who has already pounded out critically acclaimed books about the life and times of Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth, aligns her campaign promises in an aggressive way that is also as much about her journey to find the truth than it is reinforcing simple beliefs about how the game has strayed from its sweet spot.

American would love Leavy and her appropriately salty language. The game would be better for her. It already is just having her manifesto published.

Leavy may not be reasonably labeled a Luddite, but she lovingly spitballs idea to take away as much technology as possible for the sake of restoring more humanity. Whatever brings back joy and romance that’s been buried in data-driven digbats. Her idea of “three true outcomes” is finding room for more afternoon games, better access for kids in the ballpark and reversing the epidemic of pitching injuries with better guidelines in place. Along the way, she saddles up next to like-minded thinkers — Dave Roberts, Dusty Baker, Bill James and Janie Marie Smith — to add their voices.

“I know you should be commissioner,” former big-league chucker Bill “Spaceman” Lee says at one point. “You’re not for the players. You’re not for the owners. You’re for the game.”

Leavy blushes, and carries on.

Maybe she can also reverse this whole thing involved how and why Athletics moved out of Oakland, escaped to Sacramento, and await a new ballpark in Vegas to be finished.

(And, by the way, pro baseball does already have a female commissioner. Google the name Justine Siegal if you have a moment. That’s “gal” at the end, not … never mind.)