Makeshift Fields: Chasing Baseball Across Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales

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.

Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), On Comics and Grief (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2024), and the co-author (with Heidi LM Jacobs) of 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer (Biblioasis, 2021). He lives in Windsor, Ontario and teaches at the University of Windsor.