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Ballpark: The Story of America’s Baseball Fields
By Lynn Curlee
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2005. 44 pages
I am person for whom the word cathedral is an appropriate synonym for ballpark; no matter the stadium, I have never entered a ballpark and caught the first glimpse of green without feeling my heart speed up and my sense of anticipation jump. Baseball, with all its troubles as a business, remains a tremendous and storied game that is worthy of something like, if not actual, reverence. A lot of that has to do, I think, with the environs in which the game is played—that diamond-shaped field that is, in whatever time or place, always the same and always unique.
In Ballpark, writer and illustrator Lynn Curlee offers a brief history of ballparks that is also a brief history of baseball. After an overview of today’s ballparks, Curlee takes the reader back to “bat-and-ball” games played by soldiers on fields at Valley Forge and, later, in more organized fashion at places such as Madison Square Park in New York City and the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Civil War, when “baseball really took root,” leads to the late nineteenth century and the establishment of professional leagues and the ballparks that came with them.
With ballparks as the constant, Curlee introduces key people and events: Ty Cobb; the first president to throw out a first ball; Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Cal Ripken. He offers the stories behind the great parks of the past and present, from Ebbets and Wrigley to Candlestick and Camden Yards.
Curlee’s writing is complemented by his graceful paintings that capture moments without pretense and make evident his reverential feel for the places in which baseball is played. In an age of big sports money and the shame of steroids, Ballpark is a satisfying reminder of why baseball is a game to be loved, why it so fills the hearts of children of all ages, and why we should work hard to discover how to keep it pure.
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