Review: Makeshift Fields

I’ve spent a lot of time at ballparks over the last almost twenty years since I started dating my ball-playing boyfriend. A lot. While I never played baseball myself, I do enjoy sports and played basketball, and so, I’ve grown to love the game. When I heard about Dale Jacobs’ latest book, Makeshift Fields: Chasing Baseball Across Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales, I knew I wanted to check it out. The fact that it was published the day before I was leaving for a two week trip to Ireland was just a nice bonus!

Here’s the book’s description:

Makeshift Fields is a snapshot of grassroots baseball in Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. Played as it is in the rain and cold, on temporary diamonds that are sometimes less than ideal, baseball is still fragile in these places. This book is the story of people who love the game, the story of people who believe that baseball can flourish where it’s been planted, with each location contributing its own idiosyncrasies.

On one hand, baseball is baseball, and what is depicted is not dissimilar to what one might see in North America. On the other hand, it feels different. More precarious, yes, but also more communal. This is baseball played for its own sake, played in public parks by people who have fallen in love with the game, or people who are searching for a piece of home.

The title of this book, Makeshift Fields, refers to how so many of the teams Jacobs’ visited had to set up their own fields whenever they wanted to train or play. Baseball is, as you’d expect, is a very niche sport in the UK and Ireland so other sports - football, rugby, cricket, and hurling, just to name a few - take priority for many people. The ball players have to schlep bases, backstops, and sometimes even mounds to the park and often have to deal with folks strolling through the outfield while out for an afternoon walk. But they do it. They do it for, yes, the love of the game.

That’s what struck me - and Jacobs - most about his travels to the UK and Ireland for research for this book. The folks who are choosing to play baseball in these countries are doing it because they love it so much. There’s some undefinable thing that draws them to the game and keeps them playing. Jacobs tried to have many of the people he spoke to define it, that thing. He was always asking, “Why baseball? What does it mean to you?” It’s a hard thing to answer for a lot of people, especially when baseball has been a part of their lives for so long. Even though there might not have been a definitive answer, these players - no matter their skill - enjoy the game on a level most of us can’t comprehend and that, surprisingly enough, came through the pages. I felt the love of the game from the people Jacobs interviewed.

There were times when Jacobs went too inside baseball for even me. I wasn’t particularly interested in the minutia of every game he watched (what the count was, and so on). And sometimes the physical descriptions of every single person he talked to got a bit tiresome. It should have helped me picture who he was chatting with but it, for some reason, just didn’t work for me.

Jacobs traveled to Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales over the course of seven weeks with a schedule that would have been so complicated to organize. Unlike in North America, games were mostly played on weekends as so many teams had to travel so far to play each other. It was really fun reading about some of the locations I had just been to in Ireland or where I’d previously been in Scotland (as well as the list of places I’d love to visit someday). To think that, yes, there is baseball there, was delightful.

Whether you’re playing or watching baseball in Ireland or Canada, or any other country around the world, the game is fundamentally the same. But, as Dale Jacobs learns in his book Makeshift Fields, the game may be the same but it’s Irish baseball, Scottish, English, Welsh baseball. The love of the game and the determination of the players and league organizers make it a different sport there and I enjoyed reading as Jacobs took me along for the ride.

*An egalley of this novel was provided by the publisher, Invisible Publishing, via Edelweiss in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*