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The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays
A collection of essays for ardent seamheads and casual baseball fans alike, The Utility of Boredom is a book about finding respite and comfort in the order, traditions, and rituals of baseball. It's a sport that shows us what a human being might be capable of, with extreme dedication--whether we're eating hot dogs in the stands, waiting out a rain delay in our living rooms, or practising the lost art of catching a stray radio signal from an out-of-market broadcast.
From learning about America through ball diamond visits to the most famous triple play that never happened on Canadian soil, Forbes invites us to witness the adult conversing with the O Pee-Chee baseball cards of his youth. Tender, insightful, and with the slow heartbreak familiar to anyone who's cheered on a losing team, The Utility of Boredom tells us a thing or two about the sport, and how a seemingly trivial game might help us make sense of our messy lives.
From learning about America through ball diamond visits to the most famous triple play that never happened on Canadian soil, Forbes invites us to witness the adult conversing with the O Pee-Chee baseball cards of his youth. Tender, insightful, and with the slow heartbreak familiar to anyone who's cheered on a losing team, The Utility of Boredom tells us a thing or two about the sport, and how a seemingly trivial game might help us make sense of our messy lives.
160 pages, Paperback
First published April 4, 2016
9 people are currently reading
454 people want to read
About the author
Andrew Forbes
9 books77 followersAndrew Forbes is the author of the short story collections Lands and Forests (Invisible Publishing, 2019) and What You Need (2015), the latter of which was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and named a finalist for the Trillium Book Prize. He is also the author of The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays (2016), and The Only Way is the Steady Way: Essays on Baseball, Ichiro, and How We Watch the Game, (2021). Forbes lives in Peterborough, Ontario.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
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December 30, 2018BLURBED IT/LOVED IT: "Baseball is a welcome obsession of mine, a comfort. Reading The Utility of Boredom by Andrew Forbes fed that obsession beautifully, warmly. It glows. He writes of baseball as sanctuary, baseball in both general terms and specifics—from the feeling of walking into a ballpark on a summer day to Vin Scully’s perfect description of a cloud. He invites us to get on our tiptoes and peek over the fence, smell the grass, hear the crack of the bat. He respects the slow-glory of the game, he loves the game, he’s really good at this, and I absolutely trust him with my baseball-heart."
September 29, 2023
Well worth a read if you’re in any way a baseball fan and if you’re not a fan these essays will help you understand why baseball is the game of life in its clearest form. Beautifully written essays about a sport near and dear to my heart.
June 22, 2024
[5.0]
July 4, 2016
Highly recommended if you enjoy your sports writing a little more poetic and philosophical.
January 29, 2024
The best sports writing is about baseball and I will not hear arguments. Each essay here is to be savoured, lingered over, read and then read again. To carry us through until those most inspiring and restorative words are heard: "...and today pitchers and catchers report".
July 16, 2022
Un livre qui a comme projet d'inscrire le jeu de la balle dans l'Universel. C'est plutôt réussi. Se lit avec Baseball-Reference et Wikipédia à portée de main. La traduction est quasiment sans aspérités. L'utilisation des unités métriques fait partie de ces aspérités.
October 9, 2019
The Utility of Boredom is a strong collection of stories about author Andrew Forbes' love for baseball. Forbes, a Canadian growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa, writes often about his Toronto Blue Jays, but also about the sport as a whole, the experience of being in a ballpark, of sharing a night at a game with a stranger or your child, about the humanness found within the great American pastime. But more importantly, Forbes is writing about what makes us so uniquely human, about the experience which form and shape the human condition. Whether it's foibles or heroics, we all share the same interior design of fears, hopes, desires. What could have easily been a serious of cute stories relating to a personal connection with the sport to which the author loves deeply transcends into the philosophical and the humanistic aspects of the tedium which we face on a daily basis. And after reading this short collection, I believe in what Mr. Forbes has to say. Baseball is unlike any other sport in its tedium, its rules, it prolonged nature and because of that, it is all the more human. It tells us things about ourselves through the mere partaking in it. We may not all throw 105 mph fastballs or send balls flying over the Green Monster, but we have good days and we all have bad days.
June 9, 2016
This collection is uneven, as many are, but the parts I liked I liked a lot. Great writing, and especially the essays on the Blue Jays of 1992 WS and last year's run appealed to me on an emotional level.
November 3, 2019
Fantastic essays that capture the beautiful "boredom" that is baseball. The book proves why watching 9 innings (or more) of a meaningless game in the mid-day heat of July is better than just about anything else. Slow down, grab a beer and a hot dog, sit back, and enjoy.
November 4, 2016
Excellent! Proper review to come, Craig.
July 11, 2021
En général c'est un beau petit livre qui parle d'une passion pour la balle, et il n'y en a pas tant des livres comme ça. Certains chapitres sont vraiment très biens, surtout ceux à propos des stades, et du parcours atypique de certains joueurs hors de l'ordinaire. Les liens avec la vie personnelle de l'auteur qui sont fréquents dans le livre ne sont pas toujours intéressants et pertinents et c'est parfois un peu long. La traduction française très mots pour mots n'est pas très réussie et le rythme de lecture en est affecté. Je crois que la version originale anglaise rend davantage justice au style d'écriture de l'auteur.
August 4, 2017
Sure this is a book for baseball fans. And a rare one that isn't all about a single team or player. But it's also a well written masterpiece of literature. Small things like Marco Scuturo's foul ball become interesting. I enjoyed this book cover to cover. It was sadly too short. An instant baseball classic.
October 19, 2017
The sentiments here can get a little repetitive by the end, but this is a fantastic collection for baseball fans and non-fans alike. Beautiful prose throughout and a really sincere depth of feeling. Love that Forbes approaches the subject from so many angles and talks about the glory and pain of fandom as much as the sport itself. Will definitely be giving this to a few people for Xmas.
November 14, 2017
I'm no longer a passionate baseball fan—not since I was a kid—but I found this little book to be a terrific and thoughtful read. Thanks to my son, Colin, for suggesting it. The writing is clever and amusing, and sometimes poignant. Yes, it's about baseball, but it's also about the human condition. Kudos to author Andrew Forbes and the publishers.
December 22, 2018
J'hésite entre donner 3 ou 4 étoiles... J'ai bien aimé les textes, mais j'ai trouvé le recueil en général assez répétitif. Les premiers textes étaient prometteurs, mais j'ai rapidement trouvé ma lecture redondante... Cela dit, l'écriture d'Andrew Forbes coule très bien. J'ai beaucoup aimé son style!
March 19, 2021
I enjoyed picking this up every few days. It brought me to the ball parks I love and made me reflect on games I’ve been too. Baseball is one of my favourite sports to watch and this book was a pleasure to flip through.
July 9, 2021
Enjoyable and quick read. I don't see myself in a lot of the stories told in the essays about being a fan of baseball but I enjoyed the ones about specific players or moments. The last essay of the book could very well have been narrated by James Earl Jones.
March 22, 2025
How can you not be romantic about a book about baseball? 😉
Loved the stories, perspectives, and memories Andrew Forbes shared in this book of beautiful essays.
Onto “The Only Way is The Steady Way” next … ⚾️
Loved the stories, perspectives, and memories Andrew Forbes shared in this book of beautiful essays.
Onto “The Only Way is The Steady Way” next … ⚾️
June 18, 2017
Boring.
July 17, 2017
Una joyita que habla de baseball y la vida. Vale la pena si te gusta el baseball.
March 6, 2018
Knocks it out of the park. :) Absolutely loved this book. Brought back so many sweet childhood memories. Excellent read.
March 17, 2018
Un excellent livre, presque poétique, qui met en lumière toute la beauté de ce sport.
April 24, 2018
Courts textes sur le baseballl écrits par un passionné!
January 17, 2022
Somehow puts into words what baseball means to your soul - clever, special, vindicating, satisfying on a number of levels.
October 1, 2022
I really loved this. Especially the Ottawa references!
May 31, 2023
Je suis une grande fan de baseball, mais c'était trop de statistiques pour moi. Meilleure chance la prochaine fois? Je n'ai pas terminé malgré le potentiel.
March 7, 2017
Leave it up to a Canadian to publish a book that catches baseball in all its sadness and melancholy
June 16, 2016
No matter the genre or topic, a book that is a collection of essays or short stories will usually be a mixed bag with some good ones, some not-so-good ones and some that are so-so. That is not the case with this collection of baseball essays penned by Andrew Forbes. Each story is one that Forbes writes from the heart and expresses his love for the game of baseball and his favorite team, the Toronto Blue Jays.
Of the essays that talk mostly about the game on the field, his love of the Blue Jays shows, especially the ones about the 1992 World Series championship team and the emotions he was experiencing during the 2015 postseason that ended with the Blue Jays losing to the Kansas City Royals in the American League Championship Series.
One of the passage in that essay is a great illustration of the terrific writing Forbes exhibits in each story. When describing his joy when Jose Bautista hit a home run in the deciding fifth game of the Division Series, Forbes describes when he “lost it” in this fashion:
“It was the most gloriously and deliriously deterministic moment imaginable…It was fantasy made real, anti-logic captured on live TV. It was a bullet to the brain of objectivity. It made no sense whatsoever and it was beautiful.” That is quite the description of a moment that many fans will experience when their favorite team has a dramatic moment – in this case it was Bautista’s home run and subsequent bat flip. I thought the description of his emotions and passions in that paragraph was vivid and beautiful.
Other essays that were excellent included one on San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Baumgarner, defunct teams such as the Seattle Pilots and the essay that matches the title of the book. I will end this review with an excerpt from that essay as it had the best explanation I have read that tells why I and many other fans believe that baseball is the greatest game on earth:
“You have to think of the long game. Baseball’s an exercise in concentration, a chance to train the brain to ignore the echoes of other forms of entertainment offering easier enticements. You sit through nine innings because that’s how long a game is and you want to watch a game. You sit through blowouts. You endure a game devoid of offense and call it a pitcher’s duel. When you attend a game, you show up early and stay until the final out is recorded, transit schedules and traffic be damned. This is your quiet commitment. This is your loyalty and your investment., your faith that every recess and concavity will eventually be mirrored by something amazing. Slow and steady, you say.”
Amen.
I wish to thank Invisible Publishing for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Of the essays that talk mostly about the game on the field, his love of the Blue Jays shows, especially the ones about the 1992 World Series championship team and the emotions he was experiencing during the 2015 postseason that ended with the Blue Jays losing to the Kansas City Royals in the American League Championship Series.
One of the passage in that essay is a great illustration of the terrific writing Forbes exhibits in each story. When describing his joy when Jose Bautista hit a home run in the deciding fifth game of the Division Series, Forbes describes when he “lost it” in this fashion:
“It was the most gloriously and deliriously deterministic moment imaginable…It was fantasy made real, anti-logic captured on live TV. It was a bullet to the brain of objectivity. It made no sense whatsoever and it was beautiful.” That is quite the description of a moment that many fans will experience when their favorite team has a dramatic moment – in this case it was Bautista’s home run and subsequent bat flip. I thought the description of his emotions and passions in that paragraph was vivid and beautiful.
Other essays that were excellent included one on San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Baumgarner, defunct teams such as the Seattle Pilots and the essay that matches the title of the book. I will end this review with an excerpt from that essay as it had the best explanation I have read that tells why I and many other fans believe that baseball is the greatest game on earth:
“You have to think of the long game. Baseball’s an exercise in concentration, a chance to train the brain to ignore the echoes of other forms of entertainment offering easier enticements. You sit through nine innings because that’s how long a game is and you want to watch a game. You sit through blowouts. You endure a game devoid of offense and call it a pitcher’s duel. When you attend a game, you show up early and stay until the final out is recorded, transit schedules and traffic be damned. This is your quiet commitment. This is your loyalty and your investment., your faith that every recess and concavity will eventually be mirrored by something amazing. Slow and steady, you say.”
Amen.
I wish to thank Invisible Publishing for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
December 1, 2016
A person i trust and admire once told me that even though I don't care very much about most sports, sports-WRITING should still be interesting to me, because it deals with all the aspects of great literature: fascinating characters, intriguing conflict, and universal truths. Forbes goes above and beyond delivering on all of these, presenting baseball--a sport I do actually love--as an existential project and baseball fandom as a phenomenological experience. This is a beautifully thoughtful and reflective book that takes baseball as a mere starting point to hint at far greater themes, and we're all better for having Forbes in our midst.
"Here's the truth of it: the game makes sense. Down there on the field we know just what's at stake. It's a cleaner, truer expression of ourselves. It's something to make the hair on our arms stand up, something to hold dear and pass along and worry over. But here's the rest of that truth: it promises more torment and frustration than most of us would otherwise willingly invite into our lives. It requires pain and heartbreak. It's not easy, not if you're doing it right." -- "Home"
"Baseball won't stave off death. I know this. It won't solve our myriad problems. Not mine, not yours, and not the world's. But the flash of hope I get from the phrase 'Pitchers and catchers report' feels like jumpstarting a car. It's a dark curtain peeled back. It sounds the way fresh-cut grass smells. If, as I suspect, the only way to confront death is to take pleasure in the days beforehand, then I take extreme pleasure in those words, their sonority and cadence--pitchers and catchers report--and the hope they represent. Summer, warmth, colour." - "Reviving Summer"
This book is about things a great deal more serious than baseball and it's all the more magnificent for that.
"Here's the truth of it: the game makes sense. Down there on the field we know just what's at stake. It's a cleaner, truer expression of ourselves. It's something to make the hair on our arms stand up, something to hold dear and pass along and worry over. But here's the rest of that truth: it promises more torment and frustration than most of us would otherwise willingly invite into our lives. It requires pain and heartbreak. It's not easy, not if you're doing it right." -- "Home"
"Baseball won't stave off death. I know this. It won't solve our myriad problems. Not mine, not yours, and not the world's. But the flash of hope I get from the phrase 'Pitchers and catchers report' feels like jumpstarting a car. It's a dark curtain peeled back. It sounds the way fresh-cut grass smells. If, as I suspect, the only way to confront death is to take pleasure in the days beforehand, then I take extreme pleasure in those words, their sonority and cadence--pitchers and catchers report--and the hope they represent. Summer, warmth, colour." - "Reviving Summer"
This book is about things a great deal more serious than baseball and it's all the more magnificent for that.
January 27, 2017
An enjoyable read for baseball fans. This collections of essays shares the author's personal experiences with the game, and how baseball has shaped his life. There is much I could relate to in the book; the author is about 5 years older than me, so I recalled many of the players from his youth he writes about. It felt like a light read at times, but I enjoyed many of the stories contained within.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews