Roadside
Baseball: A Guide to Baseball Shrines Across America,
by Chris Epting
For some, thoughts of the spring equinox bring
visions of tulips, Easter bunnies, and fresh green lawns. But
most red-blooded Americans know that spring signals the start
of a far more important event, one that includes migrations
to oddly-shaped enclosures all over the country and a siren
call shouted by odd little men dressed in black: "Play
Ball!" In Roadside Baseball: A Guide to Baseball Shrines
Across America, Chris Epting, author of James
Dean Died Here,has woven together little-known facts
about the early history of America's national pastime with historical
and contemporary photographs, creating a tapestry sure to fascinate
and entertain baseball fans of all ages.
In Roadside Baseball, Epting shares
his discoveries: locations of long-forgotten ballparks, graves
where many of baseball's luminaries are buried, and places
important to the history of baseball. The book is organized
into five geographic regions: the East, the South, the Midwest,
the West, and Outside the Lines (Alaska, Canada and Hawaii).
"Jackie Robinson resided here with his family from
1922 to 1946" |
Using this book, fans can go and stand on the
spot where the first World Series took place in 1903 in Boston,
Massachusetts, the site where Lee Richmond pitched the first
perfect game in 1880, and the birthplace of the Little League
in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Epting's enthusiasm for the
game is revealed in his comprehensive listings of plaques
and monuments like the statue outside Atlanta's Turner Field
that memorializes Ty Cobb's famous base slide, and the birthplace
of Albert Spalding, a nineteenth-century baseball pioneer.
The plaque in front of a vacant lot in Pasadena, California,
marking the location of a house where Jackie Robinson once
lived is one you would probably miss without Epting's guidance.
Now home to the Dunsmuir High School
Tigers, Babe Ruth once played here. |
No roadside baseball book would be complete
without visits to famous parks like the Pac Bell Park
in San Francisco, Wrigley Field in Chicago, the PNC park in
Pittsburgh, Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, the former site
of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Epting has also sought out and
described lesser-known but meaningful baseball venues like
California's Dunsmuir City Field where Babe Ruth played an
exhibition game in 1924.
Chris Epting's Roadside Baseball
is a marvelous resource—a book that roadtrippers, especially
those with a hankering for green grass, freshly oiled mitts,
and the sharp thwack of a homer—will enjoy wherever they
roam.
Mark
Sedenquist
3/21/04
|
