BALLS, BATS AND BLUE BOOKS: AT SAINT JOSEPH'S, AN ACADEMIC EXAMINATION OF THE NATIONAL PASTIME
Contact: Tom Durso, 610.660.1532, [email protected]
Philadelphia, Pa. -- Baseball has inspired poetry and drawn rhapsodic praise from some of the country's most gifted writers, but this semester Saint Joseph's University's Dr. John Lord is taking a more hardheaded look at America's pastime.
The avowed Chicago Cubs fan, a professor of food marketing in SJU's Haub School of Business, is teaching a weekly undergraduate course called Baseball: Traditions and Business.
"The purpose of the course is to explore all the dimensions of baseball--and there are so many--to get an overall reflection of the American character, for good and for bad," says Dr. Lord, who also coaches American Legion and high school baseball. "From labor relations to economics to culture and race relations and so much more."
Helping Dr. Lord will be an impressive array of guest speakers. Among them are former Philadelphia Phillies president Bill Giles, a longtime baseball executive and son of a former National League president, who will participate twice, in sessions on labor relations and the economics and politics of new stadiums. Houston Astros general manager Gerry Hunsicker, a Saint Joseph's alumnus, will discuss the day-to-day affairs faced by major-league GMs, labor relations and the prospect of long-term fiscal sanity, and the future of the game.
Baseball is, of course, a game, but the coursework and reading in Dr. Lord's class are anything but. The class will examine such weighty and contemporary issues as public funding of stadiums, urban culture, salary arbitration and free agency, and the problems facing the game as it attempts to survive and thrive. The amount of reading approaches 4,000 pages and includes such respected works as Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series," Robert W. Creamer's Babe Ruth biography "Babe: The Legend Comes to Life," and David Halberstam's historical "Summer of '49."
Dr. Lord has chosen readings and video presentations to coincide with lecture topics. For the section on baseball and urban culture, for example, which will examine Brooklyn and its relationship with the Dodgers in the late 1940s and 1950s, the students will read Roger Kahn's classic "The Boys of Summer." It was the time of Jackie Robinson and of Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley's unprecedented decision to move his team to Los Angeles, and Dr. Lord will use Kahn's work to illustrate the link between the game and America's cities.
The reading and video lists mix fiction and nonfiction. Dr. Lord's lecture on the game's mythology will use W.P. Kinsella's mystical novella "Shoeless Joe," as well as "Field of Dreams," the film based on Kinsella's work. Two class sessions will be devoted to baseball and race, with Halberstam's "October 1964" and Ken Burns's PBS series "Baseball" providing the backdrop. Other video presentations include the acclaimed HBO series "When it Was a Game" and John Sayles's film version of "Eight Men Out."
The course has drawn considerable interest within the university. It filled almost as soon as it was offered last spring, and the class includes a diverse mix of majors from both of Saint Joseph's colleges.
A colleague of Dr. Lord's from the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Paul F. Aspan, assistant professor and chair of the Department of Theology, will lead the class discussion on baseball and society. This section features selections from "A Great and Glorious Game," a collection of the writings of the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former Yale University president who served as the commissioner of Major League Baseball.
The World Series will be over by the end of October, but at Saint Joseph's, one class's longer-term view will extend into December. Dr. Lord, a long-suffering Cubs fan--is there any other kind?--would have it no other way.
"It's a labor of love for me," he admits.
Founded by the Society of Jesus in 1851, Saint Joseph's University is celebrating 150 years of academic excellence. Saint Joseph's, Philadelphia's Jesuit university, is home to 3,300 full-time undergraduates and 3,000 graduate and nontraditional students. The school's strong liberal arts tradition fosters rigorous and open-minded inquiry, maintains high academic standards, and attends to the development of the whole person.
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