Meet Seth Tannenbaum, author of Bleacher Seats and Luxury Seats at Bethany Beach Books on Saturday, June 27th at 6:30pm.

Seth Tannenbaum

Seth S. Tannenbaum is an assistant professor of sport studies at Manhattanville University where he teaches classes like Baseball and American Society, Spectators and Fans, Urban Sport, and American Sport History. He earned a PhD in American History at Temple University and a BA in History at Vassar College. Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth Century Ballpark, which examines Americans’ changing understandings of urban areas, inclusion, and the body politic, is his first book. It analyzes how team owners used ballparks’ designs, locations, and amenities to keep fans coming back to the park amidst significant changes in cities and in leisure consumption patterns. His other scholarship has been published in The Journal of African American History, The Journal of Sport History, Nine: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture, the Washington Post, and the Philadelphia Inquirer among a number of other venues.

Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites

Celebrated as a democratic space for all Americans, the major league ballpark in fact privileged the middle- and upper-class white male fan while tacitly marginalizing poor urban residents and people of color. Seth S. Tannenbaum examines how the game’s economically and socially stratified system reflected changing understandings of urban space, inclusion, and the body politic.

Major League Baseball owners and executives masked exclusion and division by touting the game’s accessibility and instituting few overtly discriminatory policies. Affluent white males enjoyed a comfortable, safe space that reinforced their status as the prototypical American citizen. At the same time, ballparks relocated in response to how these favored fans felt about cities. Tannenbaum traces this journey from the urban locales of the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium through the suburban-oriented Dodger Stadium and Houston Astrodome to the cloistered fantasy of city life offered by Camden Yards. As he shows, owners’ pursuit of greater profits incorporated existing barriers that helped shape the structure of modern parks.

A revealing social history, Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites revises the persistent myth of the ballpark as an egalitarian melting pot.