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My shelves, and maybe yours, hold many linear feet of books that purport to describe the character and caprice of baseball. Some are elegies, some are poetry, some are simply collections of photographs. Many of them are the scratchings of yokel hacks out to make a buck rewriting their old clippings and regurgitating what the latest superstar did last season, adding the de rigueur up-from-nothing or father-in-jail or heroic-single-mother or studious-loner-in-a-rat-infested-school element. Many of these volumes defy Canadian Food Inspection Agency guidelines: they have a limited shelf life, but for reasons beyond understanding, they remain on display across the continent.

Andrew Forbes’s Field Work: On Baseball and Making a Living is something different, a literary version of the “kick change,” the pitch with the unusual vertical break that emerged last season to bedevil hitters from Rogers Centre to Dodger Stadium. This book is a series of reflections on the game, its moral order, and its geography, history, and theology. It celebrates customs and traditions. Its distinct qualities as a noteworthy addition to the canon become evident by the sixth page, when Forbes puts it this way:

All of which leads readers to a question of their own: Read on or flip to Sportsnet to watch the Toronto Blue Jays play the hapless Chicago White Sox or even the New York Yankees? My vote: read on.

It turns out that Forbes — who is both a writer and a coach of fourteen-year-old ballplayers in Peterborough, Ontario — is an enemy of precision, which is as good a definition of a baseball fan as I can conjure. The sport’s beauty is in its ambiguity and in the intermingling of skill and judgment. That is why he, like me, deplores the invasive species of the video replay to ascertain this foul ball or that trapped field catch. Baseball is the most relatable of athletic endeavours — played by people on a human scale, with human foibles. It is certainly not perfect. Just ask Bo Bichette, whose reign of error was a prominent feature of the first half of the current Blue Jays campaign.

The less erudite among us might argue for letting the umps be umps, and letting them take their lumps. Forbes does us one better, celebrating the inexactitude of the old game in a world of imprecision:

As its title suggests, Forbes’s offering is a meditation on work — a brief sequel, you might say, to George F. Will’s wonderful Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, from 1990. Both volumes present a rhetorical quandary and question: Why do we employ the word “play” when we speak of the “work” of pitching a baseball at ninety-plus miles per hour or hitting it from the plate that’s sixty feet, six inches away? Indeed, why do players speak of reporting to the clubhouse 162 days a year as going to work? (I lived next door to the pitcher Jeff Suppan for a while, and that is the phrase he always used.) Perhaps that is an athlete’s way of reminding us that what seems easy in the grandstand is hard on the ground. “Livings cobbled together, baseball dreams deferred, or savings banked in service of an off-field dream — there’s no textbook approach to the relationship between working and playing,” Forbes tells us. “Labourers with bat and glove, labourers with pick, pencil, industrial press, stethoscope. Are the figures on the diamond playing or working?” For that matter, is the writer of this review at work or simply engaging in wordplay?

One of my favourite parts of Field Work is Forbes’s artful discussion of one of the long-ago aspects of the game: the fact that the boys of summer used to do various kinds of work in the winter. He reminds us that one was a sculptor, another a dentist, a third a gravedigger. Moe Berg was a spy. A handful, including Christy Mathewson and Rube Marquard, were vaudevillians. Stan Musial was a clerk in his father-in-law’s grocery. There was something about the off-season that grounded men who, in warmer months, handled ground balls. It made them part of life beyond the bleachers.

Forbes packs a surprising amount of merit into a brisk book of 200 or so pages, where some of the chapters are but seven or eight paragraphs long. One of those chapters tells the story of Alfred Henry Spink, who was born in Quebec City in 1854. Some thirty-two years later, in St. Louis, Missouri, he started a weekly called The Sporting News, which in time became the go‑to bulletin of the Church of Baseball. All fans of the diamond knew the allure of that fat bundle of newsprint delivered to the doorway and jammed with every single box score from the past week. What we didn’t realize at the time was that after the magazine’s staff had maintained player index cards for more than a century, covering 172,000 veterans of the sport, those paper records would be fed into a charmless computer program. “In aggregate,” Forbes writes, “they constitute a massive trove of information about a group of individuals spanning economic and social lines who shared a profession, a fraternity of workers who donned uniforms and equipment to jog out onto baseball diamonds, their jobsites landscapes of dirt and grass.”

Men at work. A capacious, capricious mind at keyboard play. The combination is dazzling and unpredictable. There’s no particular reason that Forbes tells us of the first game where admission was charged — an 1858 match between amateur players from New York and Brooklyn, staged at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey — except perhaps to explain that entry cost ten cents but that it cost an additional twenty cents for a space for your one-horse brougham. “Then as now,” he writes, “you might find a deal on tickets, but the parking will kill you.”

In many respects, Forbes is a Janus figure, casting his gaze backwards and forwards. “Baseball fandom is particularly susceptible to long looks back,” he observes. “It’s a sport with a deep history, a penchant for self-aggrandizing memorialization.” True enough. Then he does a little memorialization of his own: “Depression-era journeymen with torn and dirty uniforms, missing teeth? Okay! Another photo of Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Billy Martin, and Bob Grimm palling around, sipping Cokes, fishing in their undershirts? How do I subscribe?” Later he describes the game as “a potent totem of innocence — a child’s game, attached to early memories of Maris, Mantle, and Mays, and jamming cards into your bicycle spokes, and playing pickup games in dungarees and P. F. Flyers.” The reader who needs a first name for Maris, Mantle, or Mays need not pick up this book.

That’s not to say Forbes is a hopeless antiquarian — not by any stretch. He salutes Shohei Ohtani, Ronald Acuña Jr., Mookie Betts, and Gerrit Cole, and he suggests we are “in the midst of a new golden era, populated by some of the greatest players ever to take the field.” Forbes also knows that baseball at its best remains a matter of community, and he lingers on the St. Paul Saints, the Triple‑A outfit that plays just twenty kilometres away from where the Minnesota Twins toil but in a different world entirely. Even after the 2021 purge of minor-league teams, the Saints, like so many small clubs, provide an outlet for “last-chance players sliding, diving, and stumbling across real dirt and grass.” Between innings in their intimate ballpark, he has witnessed “an eyeball race, a golf chip shot competition, a dizzy bat race, and kids piloting out-of-control go‑karts.” And you thought that the retired MLB outfielder Gary Sheffield had a dizzy bat.

Forbes is not alone in this sort of reverie. Just this spring, Will Bardenwerper came out with his Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America, a torch song to innings played in tiny Batavia, New York. “The MLB game has begun to resemble a computer simulation,” Bardenwerper writes. “Suffocating talk of ‘spin rates’ and ‘launch angles’ has taken away from baseball’s abstract beauty, with references to computer modeling dominating broadcasts and replacing the poetic cadences of the great sportswriters and broadcasters of old.” Together, Homestand and Field Work make for a sparkling double-play combination.

The episodes and anecdotes conveyed in Forbes’s work — here’s that word again — are predominantly from the United States, but he brings a distinct Canadian air, along with some memories of youth sports in Ontario and an account of Toronto’s fantasy attempt at signing Ohtani. The reader north of the border will also find comfort in seeing that Jackie Robinson breached the “colour line” and not the “color line,” that Forbes speaks of “your favourite team,” and that a players’ strike is described as a “labour dispute.” Baseball is Canada’s game, too, and not only because Ferguson Jenkins, of Chatham, Ontario, and Larry Walker, of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, are in the hall of fame down in Cooperstown.

For me, at least, there is a particularly poignant game in these pages. Forbes speaks fondly of old Forbes Field (no relation), the one-time home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, situated a fungo from where I am typing these words. Opened in 1909 and closed in 1970, Forbes Field, “so perfectly situated on its very particular plot of land, arranged a rural idyll amid the urban grid, a green respite from the smog and tumult of Pittsburgh’s twentieth-century cauldron of industry.” Upon reading that passage, I paused to steer my roadster over to the beloved site, on Roberto & Vera Clemente Drive. Here still stands the wall over which Bill Mazeroski launched his 1960 walk-off World Series home run to defeat the wicked Yankees. It’s lovingly tended by the city parks department, much the way our sporting souls are tended by baseball memories. As I stared at the shiny red brick gleaming in the summertime sun, I thought of Mazeroski, who, to cadge a line from Simon and Garfunkel, seems like a dream to me now.

In my mind, I see Maz himself, rounding the diamond, holding up his cap with its embroidered “P” as he proceeds past third and hurdles the ninety feet toward home plate and into history. I never saw that in real time, and neither did Forbes. But it nonetheless is part of our memories, his and mine and maybe yours. It speaks to an essential element in the sweet sorcery of baseball: knowing, appreciating, and revering what came before us, sometimes long before us, often not visible even in vintage newsreels. Some of these memories aren’t even ours, though we have, by some baseball mystery, absorbed them, vivid and enduring. My dad, for example, pulled for the old Boston Braves in a ballpark on the site now occupied by Boston University’s Nickerson Field, rooting for Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain and, almost certainly, praying for rain. In a world of imagination that’s richer than actual memory, like so much in Field Work, so do I, seventy-two years after the Braves decamped for Milwaukee and broke the heart of Boston.