For baseball fans, mecca is this tiny upstate village on the shores of Otsego Lake. It’s home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and one weekend every July the population swells, as thousands of fans flock here for the annual induction ceremony that features the top stars of yesteryear.
But every June, a much smaller group of baseball addicts gathers at the Hall of Fame simply to talk baseball. No, they don’t quiz one another on arcane baseball trivia like which batter has hit the most consecutive home runs without a teammate hitting one (Babe Ruth, 14). They don’t even debate whether Barry Bonds is the greatest player of all time. They are, after all, serious scholars. This year, nearly every one of the 70 people who attended the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture was a college professor who teaches a course on the national pastime.
The three-day conference, sponsored by the Hall of Fame and the State University of New York College at Oneonta, attracts historians, economists, and even a few engineers. While some of them are viewed skeptically on their campuses for pursuing what some see as a frivolous field for meaningful research, they feel at home here among colleagues who present papers on topics like “The Elements of Major League Contraction” and “Italian-American Baseball Heroes.”
“It’s tough to establish legitimacy when you teach about baseball unless you’re a tenured professor or at a prestigious institution,” says George Gmelch, an anthropology professor at Union College, in New York, and author of Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), although he adds that his colleagues at Union have never ridiculed his scholarly interest in the game.
Tom Altherr, a history professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, who has been coming to the conference since it started in 1989, once had to defend his baseball course in front of the college’s Faculty Senate after an accounting professor complained that it was a waste of taxpayers’ money.
“He had the gall to say that my students were having fun,” Mr. Altherr recalls. “Imagine that, students actually enjoying their studies.” The senate voted in favor of keeping the course, 89 to 1.
That was in 1991, when Mr. Altherr began teaching the course. Since then, some 40 books have come out of papers presented at this conference alone, and two scholarly journals have started up, the Journal of Sports Economics and Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. (Nine has its own conference, which is held annually in Arizona during, when else, spring training.)
Baseball is more accepted as a field of scholarship now, scholars here say, because they use it as a means to study other important issues, like ethnicity. The study of the game also crosses disciplines at a time when many institutions are trying to broaden their undergraduate curriculums, making it a more palatable topic for college courses. “Baseball does not separate from our culture,” says James L. Gates, the Hall of Fame’s librarian and one of the symposium’s organizers. “When baseball integrates, America integrates. When there’s a baseball strike, it’s a national story.”
When the first Ph.D. dissertation on baseball was written by Harold Seymour at Cornell University in 1956, the study of the game focused almost exclusively on history. The recent Cooperstown symposium showed how far the field has expanded.
Two business professors from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Herbert F. Lewis and Thomas R. Sexton, presented an analysis of why some major-league teams are not competitive. By studying how much teams needed to spend on player salaries to have a reasonable hope of reaching the playoffs, the pair concluded that 61 percent of teams fielded since 1985 have not been competitive because their payrolls were too low. In small markets, low payrolls are a particular problem: Eleven of the 18 teams that play in markets with fewer than five million people have not been competitive since 1985.
Later on, Mr. Lewis pointed out that his study’s methodology could be applied to basically any industry. So why did he choose baseball for its application? “I love the game and the data was available.”
The conference, perhaps not surprisingly, was dominated by men. A smattering of women attended, but the only female presenter was Maggie Sullivan, an associate professor of communication arts at Loras College in Iowa. She attracted essentially every Chicago Cubs fan in Cooperstown -- along with a few Boston Red Sox faithful -- with her presentation about a freshmen seminar she had taught at Loras called “Lovable Losers: What Is Behind the Cultural Following of the Chicago Cubs?” The Cubs haven’t won a World Series title since 1908, yet are among the most-followed franchises in baseball. There are plenty of reasons for their popularity, Ms. Sullivan suggested, including loyalty, fans who pass their passion to younger generations, and Wrigley Field, one of the oldest stadiums in baseball.
While the course was the subject of some gentle ribbing from colleagues, Ms. Sullivan says it achieved its broader goal of getting first-year students to think more critically through their writing and classroom discussions. “The topic was what held the students’ interest throughout the semester, and that’s what’s important,” says Ms. Sullivan, a self-described Cubs fanatic since 1982.
The session here in Cooperstown sparked a debate about the differences between Cubs and Boston Red Sox fans (almost as popular, and just as bad, the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since 1918). One audience member wondered why Red Sox fans are more meanspirited than those who follow the Cubs. Could it be because of New England’s Puritan roots? But that highbrow explanation was shot down by others who offered a more straightforward reason: Red Sox fans just have unrealistic expectations.
Like its topic, not all of the conference business was serious academic work. “It’s a good excuse to get back to Cooperstown once a year,” says Mr. Altherr of Metropolitan State College. Participants played a nearly two-hour game of pickup ball one evening under a light rain and then feasted on barbecued chicken, pork and beans, apple pie, and ice cream. Following dinner, Tim Wiles, director of research at the Hall of Fame, performed a dramatic reading of the poem “Casey at the Bat.” Dressed for the part in a Mudville uniform, he directed his audience to boo and hiss at the appropriate times in the poem and to shout “strike” just like a major-league umpire. The night closed out with the group singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (some knew not just the chorus, but the actual verses).
On the conference’s last day, two engineering professors, James Sherwood, of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and Robert D. Collier, of Dartmouth College, tried to answer a question on the minds of many participants: How much better is a corked bat? This season, Sammy Sosa, an outfielder for the Cubs, was suspended for several games for illegally using a bat with cork inside it.
Of course, explaining the science of a wood bat to a group of mostly humanities scholars was not easy. But Mr. Sherwood plowed ahead with a series of line graphs, pointing out that corked bats outperform solid-wood bats by 1.1 mph. Still, he cautioned that it’s also easy to get caught with a corked bat since they tend to crack open after being hit only eight times, compared with some 300 times with a solid-wood bat.
Baseball history was even made during the conference. On the first night, a record six pitchers for the Houston Astros combined to throw a no-hitter against the Yankees in New York, making it the topic of conversation for the next two days, especially with the one Astros fan here, who proudly wore an Astros jacket and hat. Nearly everyone exhibited team loyalty in one way or another, although at times it was difficult to figure out exactly where those loyalties lay.
One scholar, for instance, wore a Yankees jersey, with a Pittsburgh Pirates T-shirt underneath, and a New York Mets hat to the baseball game on the conference’s second night. In keeping with the symposium’s academic theme, the game followed the 1858 rules of Town Ball, an early version of modern baseball. For some, it took a little while to grow accustomed to throwing the leather ball directly at the base runners, although the rules explicitly prohibited hitting “with excessive fervor at close range.” And just in case the players got tired, at least one hallmark of contemporary baseball awaited nearby: a keg of cold beer.
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 45, Page A40
