When Gordon Thiesen was in high school, his favorite sport was whatever was in season.
He played all of the sports when he grew up. Now, however, Thiesen — a teacher, coach, and recruiting coordinator at Hillsdale College — admits that the game of baseball has earned a special place in his heart. This semester, he’s teaching a course called Theory and Practice of Baseball, one of two classes offered on baseball at Hillsdale right now.
Indeed, with a particularly intense World Series drawn to a close, it seems that the entire country is engulfed in baseball frenzy. Natalie Walters, a freshman student-athlete enrolled in Thiesen’s Theory and Practice of Baseball course, is no exception.
“Baseball fascinates me,” Walters said. “As a softball player here, it’s incredible to learn about it in class and then apply the strategic aspects when I’m practicing or playing with the team.”
Perhaps just as fascinating as the mechanics of baseball, however, is the little known – and at times, highly tumultuous – history of the sport.
Thiesen’s class isn’t the only one on campus that gives students an opportunity to more deeply engage with the game of baseball. Every year, Hillsdale’s Collegiate Scholars Program encourages faculty to submit their ideas for seminars to be offered as extra options for some of the top students on campus. This year, 11 such students are enrolled in Dr. Paul Moreno’s “History of Baseball” seminar, meeting once a week to discuss the ins and outs of America’s pastime.
“I’ve been interested in baseball all my life,” Moreno said. “I often use it in the other history courses I teach as an illustration of important developments in race relations, urbanization, and what’s going on in the world outside of baseball.”
After establishing itself more than 100 years ago as America’s national pastime, baseball has undergone many sociopolitical changes and demonstrated itself to be a sort of microcosm of American society. This, Moreno says, is a big part of why he – and so many other scholars – find the sport to be so interesting.
Though baseball was around in America before the 1860s, the Civil War made it a truly national game. That’s why Moreno’s seminar spends a lot of time discussing baseball throughout its early years in the 19th century, exploring the several decades it took to work out the particulars of the game – for example, determining the distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate.
“It wasn’t really until 1901 with the formation of the American League that you get a system that hardly changes at all until 1953,” Moreno said. “There were eight teams in each league, and players usually played for the same team for their entire career.”
Baseball is still big in the United States, but many scholars of the sport believe that the game no longer enjoys the status it once held in the eyes of the American people. To Moreno, this has a lot to do with the current structure of the major leagues.
“It used to be that you if you won the pennant, you played the World Series. It’s moved towards more of an NFL wild card-type system – it’s less distinctive,” he said.
What’s more is the fact that, ironically enough, the formation of players’ unions in the 1960s forced the owners of baseball teams to become much more profit-minded. While both players and managers are better off financially than they once were, the game of baseball itself has suffered and become more of a big business, according to Moreno.
Baseball has also declined in popularity because of the increasing prominence of televised athletics.
“TV is more geared towards basketball and football,” Moreno explained. “There’s no substitute for watching baseball live at the stadium.”
Despite the dominance of the NFL and the NBA, however, America’s pastime hasn’t completely lost its luster.
Even in modern times, academics are still very much drawn to baseball by virtue of the fact that it is a thinking man’s game. For Moreno, you don’t have to be an athlete yourself to understand or even appreciate the sport.
“I was never very good at the game,” he said. “There was one year in middle school where I could throw strikes.” His admitted lack of prowess in the game, however, hasn’t taken away from his affinity for it.
The sport of baseball continues to make us celebrate, cry, and scream ourselves hoarse, and every new season gives many Americans the opportunity to back their favorite teams. For Thiesen, it’s the Tigers. For Walters, it’s the nascent Cubs. For Moreno, it’s the good old Yankees. Despite its tumultuous history and evolution, America’s pastime continues to serve as a powerful source of unity and excitement – and the historical record suggests that it will live on for many, many innings.
