Books and Baseball

Several weeks ago, in sync with the start of Major League Baseball’s 2025 season, the University of Nebraska Press published David Krell’s 1978: Baseball and America in the Disco Era. It is the third such volume Krell has done, following 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK (2021) and Do You Believe in Magic? Baseball and America in the Groundbreaking Year of 1966 (2022). If you are a heavy reader of baseball books, especially one old enough to actually remember the years 1962, 1966, and 1978, on and off the diamond, you should check Krell’s books out. They are workmanlike, while at the same time conveying a longstanding passion for baseball. And the notion of zeroing in on a particular year in this way has an inherent appeal (for this reader, at least), even if the choices of what to focus on in the culture at large tend to be scattershot, only intermittently productive of insight.