Elm Grove Publishing
Tuesday July 29, 2025
Nelson Wolff's latest book explores baseball's intrinsic ties to mythology and nature.
The former Bexar County judge and San Antonio mayor pens a love letter to the sport in "The Elysian Fields of Baseball: The Spiritual Evolution of America's Game."
By Tom Orsborn, Staff writer
July 29, 2025
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Nelson Wolff traces the origins of his undying love for baseball back to childhood Sunday picnics along the banks of the San Antonio River.
In his new book "The Elysian Fields of Baseball: The Spiritual Evolution of America's Game," the retired local political titan recalls how he and his two brothers played catch with their dad on those long-ago afternoons as older boys participated nearby in hard-fought pickup games.
During one of those idyllic family outings, the elder Wolff delivered a sermon to his sons about how the "spirituality of nature, combined with the lore and traditions of baseball" would help guide their "ambitions, hopes, and dreams."
"Baseball will also prepare you to embrace life's risks and teach you to persevere through setbacks," Nelson Gus Wolff told his wide-eyed boys.
"The game is marked by failures, punctuated by brief moments of exhilaration. Even with eight teammates on the field, you can often feel isolated. No one can assist you while you're at bat, fielding, throwing, or pitching. When you're at the plate, you'll likely fail more often than you succeed; even the best hitters achieve a hit only one out of three times. Yet, you must strive for that double, triple, or home run to offset those failures.
"Baseball underscores the importance of taking risks on the field — stealing second base, charging the plate on a squeeze bunt, and diving for a line drive in the outfield instead of waiting for it to bounce."
As one can gather from that passage, "The Elysian Fields of Baseball" is largely a love letter to the national pastime. But it also offers a colorful, anecdote-filled look at San Antonio's baseball history generously sprinkled with interviews Wolff conducted through the years with an array of interesting characters, including controversial pitcher-turned-author Jim Bouton, then-102-year-old historian Jacques Barzun and minor league executive Branch Barrett Rickey III, grandson of Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers president who signed Jackie Robinson.
Wolff, the 84-year-old former five-time Bexar County judge, also sheds light on the role the movie "Bull Durham" played in the construction of Wolff Stadium. In a nod to diversity and inclusion from a fervent Democrat whose lengthy, illustrious career also included stints as a Texas legislator and mayor of San Antonio, the book has chapters devoted to the Negro Leagues and women in baseball.
Wolff spoke with the San Antonio Express-News recently about "The Elysian Fields of Baseball", which was published by San Antonio's Elm Grove Publishing and is available for purchase via Amazon. The interview has been edited for length and clarity:
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Q: What motivated you to write this book?
A: I had been reading over time a great deal about Greek mythology and I really got caught up in nature and climate-control issues and how we're (screwing) up the earth, slowly but surely, and so it began with that kind of a thing. ... Then I was reading how (baseball) began at the Elysian Fields of Hoboken (in New Jersey in the 1830s and 1840s) and what the Greeks believed in, how all righteous people went to live forever among splendid trees and flowers and whatnot. And so I thought if I could write something tying nature to baseball, well, maybe that would be an interesting way to write about it. And then tying the religious aspects of cathedrals to baseball stadiums, like Wrigley Field, which was built on the grounds of a former seminary, the chapels of minor league baseball, the nature aspect, playing on green fields under open skies. So it didn't start with baseball, but I thought it all tied in so beautifully.
Q: You've written several books. What is your writing process?
A: It's very unorthodox. For instance, right now I'm writing a book about being county judge. I did the mayor book ("Mayor: An Inside View of San Antonio Politics, 1981-1995", co-authored by Henry Cisneros and published by the Express-News in 1997), and this county judge book will be the bookend of it. It's up to 43 chapters. Now, what do I do? I've got notes going back in the county judge thing 24 years now, and it's all on my computer, a chaotic mess of notes. And so I have no idea how it's going to turn out, but then I start trying to make sense of it and put it together. With this baseball book, I would write a chapter on women and then a chapter about the Negro Leagues, and then I tried to figure out how to put all this (crap) together. So, it's a very unorthodox way of writing. When I sit down and start pounding away, I have no idea where the (expletive) it's going to go. No such thing as an outline.
Q: On the surface, it's a valentine to the national pastime, but you also cover the harm the Steroids Era had on the game and you hammer Major League Baseball and its owners pretty hard. How has greed, especially among the owners, hurt the game?
A: They've done tremendous damage to the game, and they're still doing it. They're not through. They've made so many incredible bad mistakes. Read the numbers about how much viewing of baseball has gone down in the major leagues. And right now, New York and L.A. has all the money and they can buy any player they want while a lot of the other teams struggle financially. There's (inadequate) revenue sharing. There's no salary cap. And so it's become such a distorted financial picture. And then ESPN dropped its $500 million (contract), and so they're trying to figure out another way to make it up. And the only way they can make it up, they got to convince the rich clubs to share everything. And so they've just (screwed) it up.
Q: What do you see for the future of baseball in San Antonio? What do you think of the new $160 million minor league stadium set to be built downtown?
A: Well, of course, I'm very supportive of the stadium. And I think they made a very fair deal with the guys to build it. When we built (Wolff Stadium in 1994 eight miles west of downtown) things were booming there then. Of course, they're not now. But I think once you get into the center city, you'll get more attention to it and have more people going there. And I'm also particularly excited about the evolution of the baseball program at UTSA. It's done better than any of the other sports there (by recording the most successful postseason run in the history of UTSA athletics this past season).
Q: What is San Antonio's most sacred baseball spot, its version of the "Elysian Fields"?
A: The most sacred one would be, and it's not there anymore, Richter Field (an amateur venue across the street from Mission Stadium off Roosevelt Avenue at Mitchell Street and Mission Road). I was so impacted by being a bat boy there (in the early 1950s for the Transporters, a semi-pro team sponsored by the Texas Consolidated Transportation Company). A lot of former big league players played for them. I can sit here today and still tell you the starting lineup. It just made a huge impact on me.
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Tom Orsborn is a seasoned sports writer with 39 years of experience at the San Antonio Express-News and Hearst Newspapers. He can be reached at torsborn@express-news.net. From high school sports to minor league hockey to his current role covering San Antonio Spurs and the NBA's burgeoning star, Victor Wembanyama, Tom's covered nearly every angle of Texas sports, including the Dallas Cowboys, 14 Super Bowls, and the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.
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