Updated 4.15.26: Scroll to the end of this post and see the running list of people, places and things so far assigned to numbers 00 to 99.
What if we told you the history of Southern California sports in the Greater Los Angeles area can be explained in unique bios, stories and essays that are attached to the 101 different numbers worn on the front, back, or elsewhere on an athlete’s uniform?
Let’s say this covers, perhaps, the last 101 years.
Take a jersey number like 32. So many who have worn it represent all the different aspects of SoCal history. Look here: Koufax, O.J., Magic, Walton, Marcus, Quickie.
Quick — who might generate the most compelling story for anyone who has worn No. 32?
It’s probably not anyone you might think, even if given 32 guesses.
This isn’t so much about who “owns” the number, or who wore it best. Those discussions over a few beers have their own amusement element and entertainment value. Ultimately, they come up to personal preference, nostalgic entrancement, and the first one of these athletes you may have encountered between the age of 6 and 11.
We will start by defining SoCal territory as what starts below the 35°45′ latitude line, stops short of our friends in San Diego, and unites the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara as kissing cousins. All are freeway adjacent, used to traverse the landscape fluidly. Otherwise, this becomes unremittingly sized up as a misunderstood gaggle of scattershot suburbs, all in search of a cohesive landmass.
Sports helps shape its boundaries, and its communities and neighborhoods.
Los Angeles, by itself, one of the most mythologized cities in the world, blurring a public idea of the city that blends fact, fiction and Hollywood; desert, beach and snow-capped mountains; landslides, earthquakes and floods. We all have some identify from it, via the prism of a traffic jam, a yoga session or plastic surgery. From high-priced villas to a beleaguered homeless population that can’t be blamed for just wanting to enjoy a warm day on the sidewalk tent not far from a local outreach facility.
We weather this storm as we can.
Modified over the years and attributed most notably to Dorothy Park, Aldous Huxley, H.L. Menken or Alexander Woollcott — maybe even Snoop Dogg — SoCal is far more fascinating than 88 surburbs in search of city. Plant that idea in its fertile desert soil, often in sorely need of watering, and it takes root.
But it’s not all that watered down.
“Los Angeles is a city built upon amnesia and denial,” Tom Curren wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2025, helping to introduce a multi-faceted project trying to predict the future success, or failure, of the region.
“Graded and paved, bought and sold, it bears little likeness to Tovaangar, the home for the first people who, for thousands of years, walked its valleys and chaparral-clad basins and paddled its broad shorelines.
“Eventually, they were overtaken, falling silent to the noisy ambitions of foreigners and settlers who set about transforming this vast floodplain with imported water and orchards and homes. Branding their creation paradise, they never questioned their improbable aspirations.
“Instead, they mythologized their works, borrowing from the past what was convenient and discarding the rest, so the picture of the Golden State in the early 20th century was romantic enough to persuade more and more Easterners to board the trains that crossed the deserts to arrive in this transformed pueblo.”
Sports fits mightily into this ambiguous narrative that has blossomed into folklore as a geographical punchline for those outside the civic dysfunction of it all and dispassionate for clarification.
Sports shaped the region’s history — from the 1932 Summer Olympics, to the 1984 Summer Olympics, to the 2028 Summer Olympics. To baseball’s World Series championship teams jammed into the football arena that would host the first Super Bowl, Coliseums and Forums and do-it-yourself home repair-sponsored mini stadiums.
“In an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, there are 88 municipalities, countless unincorporated areas, and almost 10 million residents, many of whom aren’t entirely sure what jurisdiction they’re in at any given moment,” Conor Friedersdorf once wrote for The Atlantic in 2011.
You be the judge.
Expand your idea of the boundaries we want to cover here. And figure in all its numerology.
“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:
Illustration: Los Angeles Times
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?
Archinect.com
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.
From “Art But Make it Sports: Where Art and Sports Collide.”
“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.”
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:
== “Dawn of the Digits,” page 60:
Todd Radom
We’re so hellbent on wrapping up the SoCal Sports History 101 bio project — it’s been more than two years now of research into linking the uniform number of a person, place or thing to a story that uniquely defines Los Angeles and its adjacent communities over the last 101 years. Radom’s research on baseball jersey numbers here gets to the heart of our journey and covers the spectrum of coolness. He correctly points out that the Angels retired No. 26 for owner Gene Autry, citing how this was what players determined was his true status, worthy of the next roster spot beyond the 25-man limit. In our own post about Autry, we feel now compelled to include this not-so-random Radom tidbit: “(No. 26 was) ceded by pitcher Bill Travers, who was on the injured list at the time.” When we went to Travers’ Baseball-Reference.com page, it shows he did have No. 26 in 1981, the year Autry approved a four-year, $1.5 million free-agent deal, obtaining the services of someone who had moderate success in the previous seven seasons in Milwaukee. But then Travers needed all of ’82 off for arm surgery. That’s when his jersey number was appropriated. Coming back briefly in ’83 in what would be hiss final year — 10 games, an 0-3 mark and 5.91 ERA — Travers had to now sport No. 35. But the Angels 86’d him by them. What a sour footnote for Autry, to get saddled with that number after Travers’ slow burnout and little return on the owner’s investment.
== “Famous Fans,” page 195:
Todd Radom
Three people you’d never imagine hanging out in the same waiting room: Richard Nixon in an Angels’ cap, Ice Cube in a Dodgers’ cap, on either side of Pope Leo XIV in a White Sox-tribute miter. “It really doesn’t matter whether you are a peon, a president, a pope, or a pop star — we are all united by fandom,” Radom writes. The Nixon reference gives us even more glee in that he represents No. 12 in our SoCal Sports History 101 bio project based on his football days as a Whittier College Poet. Pope Leo XIV’s name came up in a recent book review that focused on baseball promotions. Ice Cube just had his second bobblehead night at Dodger Stadium, and we’re all the richer for it.
== “The Angels Take Flight,” page 117:
Todd Radom
Autry’s Angels were my guardian Angels. We were both birthed into being in 1961. That gives me some kind of halo effect — my arrival into the world nearly 65 years ago was in a now-demolished hospital not to far from where the Angels were playing at the now-demolished Wrigley Field, over on Avalon and San Pedro. The Angels were part of a hurried American League expansion, three years after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. I was the first step in my parent’s family expansion in South L.A., less than three years after they were out of high school. The Angels’ logo had to embrace a different look than what the Dodgers had imported with its blue palate and “LA” linking logo. The Angels’ name was somewhat redundant for those who knew Spanish and English. It played off the city’s original name: El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles/The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels.
What we also learned from Radom’s post: Casey Stengel was asked to be the original Angels manager, having been let go by the New York Yankees after they lost to Pittsburgh in the 1960 World Series. Stengel declined, “citing the fact he just signed a $400,000 deal to serialize his life story for the Saturday Evening Post, an arrangement which stipulated that he not manage in 1961.” Damn media contracts.
Radom also adds: “Just 125 days after they were created out of thin air, the mighty Los Angeles Angels were not only alive, but undefeated” after their April 11 opening-day win in Baltimore. That was powered by two Ted Kluszewski homers in his first two at bats.
In a 2011 interview prior to the Angels’ 50th anniversary season, Eli Grba, who started that first game and was the Angels’ first player picked in the expansion draft, told us: “When I started, I just felt like it was just another game. … It really wasn’t until afterward that everyone starts making a big deal out of it. Mr. Autry comes down to the locker room, and there’s the newspaper guys and the whole thing. That’s when I guess I really understood what was happening. … “Maybe it just took a while for everyone to figure us out. Who’s this team? Who are they? Who’s Eli Grba, that guy with the funny name?”
== “Guns-A-Blazing,” Page 114:
Honoring “the only MLB club ever to have displayed a smoking Colt .45 pistol across the front of their uniforms,” Houston’s expansion team of 1962 was relegated to a “bare bones” and “mosquito-plagued” Colt Stadium that never could purposefully harness the extreme Texas summer heat.
Todd Radom
They stayed three three seasons. The Dodgers’ Don Drysdale found himself on the Colt Stadium mound for the final game on Sept. 27, 1964, trying to match pitches with someone named Bob Bruce sent out there by Houston. Bruce threw all 12 innings in a 1-0 shutout witnessed by some 6,000; Drysdale could only go the first 10 innings. And so the Colt .45s had emptied their chamber, the stadium was disassembled and shipped to Mexico, and the roster was relocated across the parking lot to the brand-new Houston Astrodome. The Colts morphed into the Astros. From cowboys to space cadets.
The reason why the Colt .45s still stick to our ribs: For some inexplicable reason, that was the name of the first Little League team I played on at age 9. But this was 1970, as the name had been taken out of MLB circulation for at least four years. It’s not like we hand hand-me-down jerseys to wear. They were just T-shirt upgrades with black letters ironed on. And even then, whoever did the tailoring couldn’t figure out how to coordinate the way someone spelled out “Colt 45.s” on the shirt and how “Colt 45’s” appeared on the photo board. So, neither the fact that the team didn’t exist, nor there was still that gun-play component seared into a bunch of naive kids’ heads, nor the typographical mess of how it would be written was reason enough for our parents to be at all offended as they sat in the stands and compared Marlboro cigarette packaging. We all knew it was the Greatest Team Ever Assembled, but we could have been cooler if we had the real Colt .45 logos.
== “Nolan Ryan Has No Pitch Count Limit,” page 166:
Todd Radom
Radom re-imagines an old-time lighted scoreboard display that shows “235,” referencing not the number of Nolan Ryan strikeouts, but how on June 14, 1974 at Anaheim Stadium, just 11,083 “witnessed one of baseball’s most legendary pitching performances.” Ryan got through 13 innings, facing 58 batters, striking out 19 and walking 10. He threw a reported 235 pitches. The visiting Boston Red Sox were not all that impressed. What Radom creates here creation reminds us of the time meeting Torrance-based artist Peter Chen in 2012 to talk about the book of work he created called Jumbotron Art, which we circled back to in 2019 for the Los Angeles Times in his book form. “Pitch counts were not really a part of the game in those days,” Radom notes in the Ryan story, “but this achievement stood out to contemporary observers.” The Los Angeles Times story even mentioned that Ryan threw 84 pitches in the first four innings when he struck out nine and walked six. Ryan apparently convinced manager Bobby Winkles to let him go out for the 13th inning during the nagging 3-3 tie game. Ryan thought he was durable enough to knock off what was thought to be a personal-record 242-pitch game in Detroit in 1973 when he went all 12 innings of a complete-game win. Ryan was ready to crank it up to 13. If you dig up the boxscore, as Radom did for more research, you’ll see there are no official pitch-counts listed on Baseball-Register.com. But there is another quirky thing about that game — after Ryan was lifted to start the 14th inning, reliever Barry Raziano arrived. When Denny Doyle had a walk-off double in the bottom of the 14th to score Mickey Rivers, Raziano got the win — the only one of his MLB career. He threw the last two innings (facing six hitters) and outlasted Boston’s Luis Tiant, who encountered 56 batters himself over all 14 1/3 innings. It’s reasonable to assume El Tiante threw at least 200 pitches himself in this game. How are we to know, either in English or Spanish?
(Memo to Todd for his next book: Wouldn’t it be something to illustrate the game 10 years before this when Juan Marichal outlasted Warren Spahn as both went a full 16-inning game ended by a Willie Mays homer?But then again, Spahn threw 201 pitches in his losing effort. Marichal threw 227 to beat him. Neither of them could match Ryan).
== “An Architect For The Fans,” page 192:
A very sweet portrait of Janet Marie Smith to honor her “influence on the game that spans the continent — from Boston to San Diego to Atlanta to Los Angeles — but her magnum opus is and will always be Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, a ballpark which set the standard for a wave of classically inspired baseball-only facilities after its 1992 opening.” In our most recent ballot for the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals, Smith easily made it into our Top 10 list. It’s overdue. See SABR’s own story on Janet here.
How it goes in the scorebook:
Todd Radom
Todd Radom is brilliant — the guy is a genius, seriously. Déjà vu all over again.
An inventive, discerning, aesthetically pleasing around-the-horn double play. Radom is our modern-day media dual-threat Ohtani. Everyone wins with this showtime.
Trust that these stories will take you on a journey, that Radom is committed to making it congenial and euphoric, setting off a fireworks display of memories. This is another example of how telling stories are bigger than all of us when done effectively. They preserve history for those coming after the time we’ve all run out of innings. Having the talent to convey a story with both exceptional artistic means to compliment the written word shows takes this process up a few more notches of ebullience than anticipated.
Now, a memo to the effin’ Geffen Galleries: Not only could it offer this for sale in its bookstore, but do it as an extension of a curated display of Radom’s original artwork housed in one of your concrete coves so we can all find a cool place this summer to cool off and think of all the ways baseball moves our essential being.
More to followup:
== The Society of American Baseball Research’s Four Pillars Fund, aimed to promote research, preservation, scholarship and future of the game, has incorporated Radom into its fundraising program that gives donors access to an exclusive virtual event with him as well as a signed copy of his book. More details: https://sabr.org/donate/four-pillars
== Even more on this topic of baseball and art: Tiffany Babb of The Fan Files profiles Ryan Hungerford and his graphic design prints, pins and even scarves related to baseball — specifically, the Dodger Dog — with links to his Instagram account.
“Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark”
The author: Seth S. Tannenbaum, Ph.D. The details: University of Illinois Press, 304 pages, $30; released March 31, ’26 The links:The publisher, the author, Bookshop.org
A review in 90 feet or less:
To anyone of a certain age still most profoundly comfortable printing out an airline boarding pass because this idea that a QR code will stay secure in your smart phone after TSA is done running it through their radio-active scanners — or, more realistic, the problematic consequences of watching that smart phone fall into a Terminal 5 restroom urinal just 10 minutes before Group 12 is called — the plight of Errol Segal doesn’t sound all that bothersome.
A so-called “long-time season-seat holder” — as if that is a necessary qualification — Segal’s end game recently was to just get the Dodgers to just give him printed-out Dodger Stadium entrance tickets. Yes, everyone else seems A-OK with the post-COVID practice of having tickets downloaded to an app, to be waved in front of an infrared light with the aid of a very useful employee there to problem solve. You just hope this works through your glass-cracked phone screen, and, if you’ve bought tickets on the secondary market, the company’s software is compatible with with the stadium’s approved ticketing partner.
Plus, Segal is just fine with his flip phone and how it fits in his day-to-day business. His age or whether he can afford some kind of iPhone/Android upgrade shouldn’t be a factor either.
It’s perhaps with some irony that this story didn’t seem to grab many people’s attention until — thanks to modern technology — it became a thing on social media.
Those seeking more intel on Segal’s struggle and his feeling he had been “thrown under the bus” by the team’s administrators sticking to policy could access a) an extended video interview Segal did on a local TV news channel that, after airing a couple times, was now on the company’s website; b) the MSN.com cut-and-paste steal of a California Post story; c) AOL hjijacking a story it found on the demographically-aligned Fox News Channel; d) an earnest follow-up piece by the helpful publisher of the Los Cerritos Community News, and e) this Facebook post that, of course, didn’t quite frame the fan’s age accurately according to other reports, and then provided a perfectly toxic discussion thread, where punctuation-challenged pinheads could chime in with things like:
“Ill be that guy. If you cant use an iPhone in 2026, thats on you. He was 63 when the first iPhone came out. Im sure hes smart, hes had plenty of time to learn how to use apps. Also, iPhones are pretty user friendly for the older community”
“Lots of people feeling sorry for this guy who has had season tickets for 50 years … nah. I appreciate his fandom, but it’s better for him if he learns to live in today’s world. I’m sure someone can teach him how to use a phone. If it’s the learning something new that’s frustrating, that’s not the Dodgers’ problem. I’m GenX, and when we started working, we had to learn how to use all kinds of technology, still working, have learned to use AI, and will continue to learn my whole life. “I don’t know how” is a lame excuse.”
“Can’t wait for the Gen Z’s to get rejected cuz the eye scan doesn’t recognize ‘ancient eye rolls’ in the 22th century!”
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:
The Universal Baseball Association on YouTube.com has a tutorial on how to create an effective score sheet.
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.
Henry Chadwick, who created the “K” to note a strikeout on his scoresheets of the 1850s, would likely have to adjust to the 2026 rule introduction of an umpire challenge to a ball/strike call through ABS. This X post shows how this scorekeeper has made alterations to his notes.
“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 21st Century, thank goodness for Retrosheet.
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
The author: Robert Coover, new introduction by Ben Marcus The details: NYRB Classics, 264 pages, $18.95, originally released in 1968; newest re-release on March 17, ‘26 The links:The publisher, Bookshop.org
A review in 90 feet or less:
Based in reality, and fantasy: Willie Davis’ card from 1965 Strat-O-Matic (above) and 1963 APBA (below)
Cal Berkeley history professor David M. Henkin recently launched an efficiently written collection of essays into the universe under the title “Out of the Ballpark: How To Think About Baseball,” (Oxford University Press, $18.99, 152 pages, released March 16, ’26), dedicating a dozen chapters on enlightened questioning of philosophical and cultural issues surrounding the game.
Among other things — the obsession with statistics framing reality.
“The division between scientific and literary, quantitative and verbal, or left-brain and right-brain approaches to baseball are misleading,” Henkin declares. “They bear some resemblance to the inaccurate portrait peddled by recent Hollywood movies of baseball talent evaluators, which pits the number crunchers and bean counters against scouts who can hear the break of a curveball with their eyes closed and can foretell a player’s prospects by instincts.”
Hang on. Brad Pitt’s polished portrayal of Billy Beane in the 2011 “based on a true story” film “Moneyball” came more than seven years after we could digest the magnificence of Michael Lewis’ best-selling book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” After all, the book’s publishers continue to unflinching point out the book has company amidst “GQ’s 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century.” It’s also blurbed as “the most influential book on sports ever written” by none other than People Magazine.
But go on, Professor Dave …
“Much as scouts have always combined intuitive judgment against statistical reckoning, the same writers and fans who revel in poetic description and conjure imagined worlds of play tend to be conversant with statistics and are aesthetically compelled by probability.”
Hmmm… Probably right there. So to what perils doth that lead?
“Robert Coover’s celebrated novel, ‘The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.’ published three years before the founding of the SABR and the dawn of sabermetrics, brought into public view baseball’s twin obsessions with both literary imagination and strict bookkeeping. The novel’s protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, is an accountant. He is also a literary creator who spins elaborate stories behind closed doors about fictional baseball players but constrains those stories with statistics and probability by methodically and scrupulously using dice to simulate athletic competition.”
Henkin then presents to the court of public opinion Figure 12.1 as visual evidence, which kinda blows us away more than the Coover book reference.
How do you explain that off-beat existence? Henkin tries.
“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.
New Yorker magazine, 2018
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.)
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 