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This article was published 27/03/2021 (1872 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Longtime baseball fans Dale and Heidi Jacobs starting losing their devotion to the Detroit Tigers in 2016 and didn’t renew their regular tickets for the 2017 season.

“I thought I was through with baseball,” Heidi writes in the couple’s chronicle of rekindling that spark in a marathon of game watching during the summer of 2018.

That view changed as she and Dale drew a 100-mile (160-kilometre) radius around their home in Windsor and set out to watch 50 games in sun and rain, in crowded MLB (Major League Baseball) stands and on lawn chairs at minor league or local diamonds, sometimes two or three games in a day.

Their account is presented in each writer’s voice, alternating throughout the text, and is an effective way to describe the games and their reactions to them. If Dale is the quintessential baseball fan, describing pitch location, well-played balls, errors and always knowing the inning and score, then Heidi is more an observer of the crowd and the ballpark itself.

There is some overlap in their observations, but at times you wonder if they were at the same game. While Dale focuses on statistics, Heidi might be watching a dog chase a foul ball at a minor league park, or being astonished by a University of Michigan fan wearing maize-coloured slacks.

Together they present a full, absorbing account of any level of ball, making the point that the precision of the major leagues and the error-prone play in the minors all contain the same elements.

They take readers from MLB games in Detroit and Cleveland to small-town parks where just about everybody in the stands is related to a player, from NCAA parks with some panache to games where foul balls must be recovered from ditches or in the trees to ensure there are enough balls to finish the game.

Their unusual, hectic schedule forced them on the road to a game more than once when they were tired, but once there they never regretted it.

Dale writes that the odyssey made him realize that the focus they had on the Tigers obscured so much of what he loves about baseball, “the fact any park contains the universe and soul of baseball.”

Or, as Heidi says, there is no right way to watch: “You just need to find what makes you happy about baseball and watch it in the way that brings you the most joy.”

Dale, who teaches English at the University of Windsor, is the editor of Sunday with the Tigers: Eleven Ways to Watch a Game. Heidi, a librarian at the university, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020 and is co-writing a book about the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars, the first Black team to win an Ontario amateur baseball championship.

In accordance with baseball’s infatuation with statistics, or perhaps the authors’ academic background, the book includes a chart detailing each game, location, league/level, ticket price for two (total of $589) and round-trip in miles (total of 2,892, or 4,600-plus kilometres).

While the book isn’t a walk-off home run, it is a solid win for the authors, who rediscovered a genuine joy in watching baseball wherever it is played.

Chris Smith is a Winnipeg writer.