In the earlier years of baseball, teams played other local teams. The baseball leagues really grew as alliances of cities when intercity travel became practical, which was when the train system began to grow. It’s been critical to the growth of baseball, from the beginning. How did transportation impact the development of the game? Of course, no outfield goes forever, the same way that no game really lasts forever, but the fact that the rules don’t specify either an ending in time or an ending in space makes baseball very, very different. The outfield could go forever, in theory. It’s very, very different the way it approaches the land, and the rules only lay out the diamond itself. It’s the only major team sport that’s not played against the clock, and you don’t have goals at each end of a defined space the way you do on a football field or a soccer pitch or a basketball court or anything else. In both time and space, it’s technically infinite. I think it’s a really important part of baseball. You seem to capture that tension nicely with the image of an infinite outfield, which actually existed in the game’s early days, before ballparks began to completely enclose the field. The goal was to look at that interrelationship, that dynamic between the rural and the urban and how it plays out in baseball. Some of the best ballparks have been great urban buildings at the same time. But of course, the ballpark is different from other places like urban graveyards and cemeteries: It’s active, not passive, and you’re there to watch this magical piece of landscape, but enclosed within a structure that’s very urban. I wanted to make the point that when the baseball park starts, it’s part of that long thread of different attempts to integrate the urban and the rural, and to give you some kind of sense of open land and landscape and garden in the city. But the reality of the history of baseball is more urban, and the key thing I’m trying to say in the book is that the baseball park is actually, for 150 years, a key part of a whole category of public space in the American city, that people generally don’t look at as that. Some of that rural yearning has always been a part of the mythology of baseball: it’s why the Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown, and so forth. It goes back to Hamilton and Jefferson, and we like to believe ourselves as a rural people going across the landscape, but in fact, most of achievements have been urban and industrial, and we’ve built great cities at the same time.

Paul Goldberger: America has always, I think, struggled between rural and urban.

Ballpark by paul goldberger