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In Out of the Ballpark (Oxford, 2026), David Henkin (History) reconsiders the character, meaning, and delights of baseball by exploring the game's unusual features and the sport's many resonances with other aspects of modern life. To this end, he abandons several assumptions and mythologies that underlie most approaches to histories of baseball: that it is unique among sports and fundamentally different from other kinds of entertainment; that it is specific to the United States; that it has changed fundamentally in recent years; and that the keys to understanding it lie primarily in examining what happens on the field of play.

Instead, Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball's history since the nineteenth century and beyond US borders. He takes readers inside the structures of clubs and leagues, interprets the sacred scripture of rulebooks, and illuminates some of baseball's rites and rituals that are often associated with honor and manhood. He charts baseball's significance along the routes of American and Japanese imperial expansion and the shifting maps of race and ethnicity in the US. Baseball is found at negotiating tables that pit capital against labor and in pivotal moments in the history of mass media. He shows us how baseball might offer a complex and capacious space for thinking about such things as spectatorship, success, community, order, and contingency in the modern world.

Henkin is joined by Alva Noë (Philosophy). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.