In 2002, Johanna Wagner lived an adolescent boy’s dream: She visited all of the nation’s major-league baseball parks.
Now her favorite, PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, graces the cover of her new book “The View From the Stands: A Season With America’s Baseball Fans” (iUniverse).
“People ask me how I got so interested in baseball. It wasn’t a man who introduced me. It was my childhood nanny,” said Wagner, a Dayton, Ohio, native.
“My nanny … loved the [Cincinnati] Reds. They were always on the television while we played cards or I played with my Barbies,” she wrote.
Wagner, 36, quit her job as lighting and sound manager at The Juilliard School in New York to sit in the stands of all 30 U.S. ballfields.
She offers critiques of the stadiums and the fans, she said, from a woman’s perspective.
In Chicago, for instance, she praised the Cubs’ Wrigley Field as a sanctuary but noted “many folks seemed more interested in talking on their cell phones.”
The White Sox U.S. Cellular Field she found “antiseptic” but the fans authentic. She mused that the steep upper-deck seating surely violates building code. “It took about six innings before I no longer felt I was rolling forward into oblivion.”