From an urbanist’s point of view, these moves were mostly bush league. Just as the suburbs began sprawling across the landscape, ballparks entered a second (and unfortunate) phase by looking to the spacious suburbs for large land sites with, of course, plenty of parking. The best ballparks offer the fans “an intimacy, since their different layouts all have the ability to make fans feel connected both to the field and to each other.” A distant, more affordable site farther from downtown could be made to work thanks to close proximity of trolley lines or subways. The best ballparks offer the fans “an intimacy,” Goldberger writes, “since their different layouts all have the ability to make fans feel connected both to the field and to each other.” They are the epitome of any great public place. The owners of baseball teams, not yet thinking that they could get the public to pay for their playing fields, located their ballparks as close to the center as they could afford.

In the first phase of the ballpark, the American city was still a compact center of homes and businesses. “The ballpark is one of the greatest of all American building types, and it reveals as much about how we treat our cities today as it ever has in the past,” he writes. Goldberger expresses the history of the ballpark in American cities through four phases, ones that urbanists will appreciate perhaps even more than baseball fans. It is also a study in urbanism, using the history of the ballpark as an avenue to show the inner workings of American cities.Īuthenticity in baseball, Goldberger writes, “should mean that each ballpark is a world unto itself, a place different from all the other places in which baseball is played: that all ballparks are not the same, and that the game played within them is therefore different in subtle ways from ballpark to ballpark.” The best ballparks, he adds, are the ones in which “the rural and the urban, the natural and the man-made, are in harmonic balance.” But “Ballpark” is much more than another sports book aimed at the nostalgic male who yearns for the good old days of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn or Shibe Park in Philadelphia, and revels in the modern-day vestiges of that era at Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago. With Father’s Day just around the corner, you might view Paul Goldberger’s new book, “Ballpark – Baseball in the American City,” as a well timed merchandising move, as well as a publishing event.

Ballpark by paul goldberger