Outside Oberlin

Baseball in the Classroom? Harumph! When Pigs Fly!

I could hardly wait to get my hands on the 2000-01 course catalog. Equipped with my florescent green envelope, I dutifully stood in line at the Registrar's office for half an hour. After exchanging my redemption ticket for the hideously mustard-colored book of hope, I walked home faster than Ron Laird (alright, only the really intense sports dorks laughed at that one). The butterflies in my stomach danced as I flipped to the English classes. Frantic, I scanned the seminars and the intermediate-level courses. Nada. The colloquia! My nervous fingers fumbled with the pages. I held my breath...and kept holding it. Sigh.

My naiveté had led me to hope that some bold professor would heroically assume the duties of teaching a course on baseball literature. After all, respected schools like Middlebury and Kenyon Colleges offer one. Professors at Harvard and Brown teach baseball history classes. Think baseball is too narrow or insignificant topic for an English course? What about "American Detective Fiction in Black and White," or "Crime Stories in American Film," each offered to Oberlin students next year? Certainly these classes constitute appropriate and interesting topics for literature classes, primarily because the authors and directors attempt to capture the American ethos through criminal stories and detectives who find them.

But what, I ask, is the essence of all things American if not baseball?

If professors have shied from the topic due to the misperception of a lack of resources, take heed! Chin up, department of English, for there is no shortage. Bernard Malamud's The Natural seems the most obvious work a baseball literature class should include. Malamud spins out the folkloric American tale of an ambitious young ballplayer falling helplessly into the clutches of a career-destroying femme fatale. Can anyone say "The Natural from a feminist perspective?" The hero, Roy Hobbs, returns to the game after a significant hiatus to find competition among younger and faster players. His talent is unmistakable, but he ultimately falls into the whirlpool of sporting life, complete with a money-desperate manager and ruthless creditors. Hobbs, clearly embodying qualities of baseball heroes Shoeless Joe Jackson and Babe Ruth, proves unable to escape the tangled web that is the life of a ballplayer, ultimately falling prey to his own appetite for lust and pleasure. How about "Roy Hobbs as tragic American hero?"

Michael Roth Greenberg's The Celebrant is another obvious must for prospective professors of baseball literature. The plot details the awe-inspiring career of the legendary "Christian Gentleman," Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson. Fitting with Mathewson's legendary devoutness is the "religious experience" many readers claim to undergo upon reading Greenberg's finely-tuned novel. Really! Browse for yourself on Amazon.com! Jackie Kapinski, a recent immigrant to America from Poland, narrates and gives the novel the depth that arguably no other baseball novel can claim. Baseball is the most powerful assimilating device for Kapinski, as he adopts Mathewson as his hero in the first two decades of the 20th century, an era of American prosperity and innocence.

Finally, any good syllabus should include Fences, August Wilson's highly-acclaimed drama detailing the life of the fictional Negro League toiler Troy Maxson. Wilson, who made it his goal to craft a drama for each twentieth-century decade in America, chose to depict the 1950s through the eyes of a Negro League ballplayer and his family. Karl Lindholm, professor of Middlebury's baseball literature class, said he calls his students' attention to Wilson's seemingly intentional referencing of both the structure and themes of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. By naming his main character Maxson, Wilson cleverly alludes to both Death of a Salesman's Willy Loman (get it? Lo-man?) and Nietzsche's theory of the ultimate being as the "over" or "maxman." Who said sports writers weren't well-read?

Have I won any converts? Made any enemies? My critics will surely defend the rigid boundaries of traditional academia, arguing that just as Hemingway belongs in the classroom, baseball should remain a strictly athletic pursuit. Allow me to offer one more propagandistic statement. Responding to my urgent queries as to the appearance of baseball topics in college classrooms, Baseball Hall of Fame director of research Tim Wiles said, "Some sort of baseball course for academic credit is becoming very common in American colleges."

The Hall of Fame! What more could I offer? I've laid it on the line and stated the one item on my wish list as clearly as I know how. I'll now hold my breath for the registration supplement in the fall. Should a noble English professor answer my wish, I'll be the guy in the front row wearing a Red Sox shirt.