The Ballpark and Beyond
FROM THE PUBLISHER:”In The Ballpark and Beyond, Todd Radom takes readers on a captivating journey across 150 years of baseball history, weaving together little-known anecdotes, aesthetic curiosities, and the human drama that makes the sport timeless. Here are the tales of ornate nineteenth-century stadiums that looked like castles, the rowdy Baltimore Orioles who pioneered “inside baseball,” and the quirky pillbox caps and mascots. Discover the origins of iconic team emblems, the strange saga of a baseball game played at the foot of the Sphinx, and the unforgettable icons—from Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson to Satchel Paige and Ken Griffey Jr.—who helped elevate the game into the national consciousness.”
How can you not be intellectually curious about baseball?
I know I am. The sport has a way of rewarding (or, conversely, torturing) those of us who invest our time in it, regardless of whether we are casual fans who flit in and out, grazing on a couple of appetizers here and there, or the diehards among us who want to consume the entire tasting menu, snout to tail, from the first day of spring training right through the final out of the World Series.
Was the seventh game of the 2025 World Series the best ever played? How does it stack up against those that took place in 1925, 1975, 1991, 1960, or 2016? Would Babe Ruth and the 1927 Yankees have been able to navigate a four-round postseason, all the way to a world championship? And tell me, which team was the worst ever? Was it the 1962 Mets, the 2024 White Sox, or the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics? These types of conversations serve to fuse together players such as Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Christy Mathewson, and Randy Johnson into a single sub-theme, united across distant ages through the game… and even though the Dodgers’ 2025 uniforms featured a garish advertisement on their sleeves, the club’s core appearance was pretty much identical to their Brooklyn ancestors who won the 1955 fall classic seven decades prior. One might have to squint a bit, but it’s definitely all connected.
All of which makes me wonder: What was it like at Ebbets Field for the Dodgers’ final home game in 1957? Who was the first player to ever ride in a bullpen cart? How incredible would it have been to have seen the 1931 Homestead Grays play? And what did people eat and drink while attending a ballgame in the nineteenth century?
The stories are everywhere, and they are here, in The Ballpark & Beyond.
75,000 words, 150 original illustrations. A lifetime in the making
Sports Publishing, distributed by Simon & Schuster • 9.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) • 248 pages • ISBN: 9781683585145 • Publication date: May 26, 2026