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. 

Henkin moves across time and space to examine baseball's history since the 19th 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.

He is joined by Alva Noë (Philosophy).