Students batter-up for baseball history

By Deborah Lilly

It was the perfect summer class for history students fascinated with baseball. For the first time, Dr. Brian Dirck, an AU history professor, offered a class in baseball history, and, he says, “I had a great time teaching it.”

Dirck’s specialty is the Civil War era, and he’s a former football — not baseball — player. “But I read baseball history all the time,” says Dirck.

Dirck turned his passion for baseball and baseball history into an intensive four-week course that involved much more than discussing player stats or speculating on the World Series. “I made it clear to my students from the beginning that this was a serious endeavor,” says Dirck. There were no in-class baseball games or field trips to baseball stadiums. Students were required to read books about baseball legends, write papers and take weekly exams.

Andy Pertler, a junior history and education major, never played baseball much either. “But I grew up around the sport,” he says. “I’ve collected baseball cards ever since I was a kid. I’d get a complete set of Topps cards for my birthday every year.” Pertler says he knows a lot about baseball today, but he wanted to know more about baseball’s past.

For Pertler and Dirck the highlight of the class was a visit from former Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine. During his career, Erskine saw teams go from traveling on buses to flying across the country in airplanes. With the installation of lights, baseball went from a day game to a night game. And it went from radio to television.

He told the students about playing on the same team as Jackie Robinson, the first black player in major league baseball. The experience reflected race relations in America in the years following World War II. “In the 1940s, America, in sort of a natural accepting way, was segregated,” says Erskine. That meant many times Robinson faced jeers and threats from white baseball fans and often couldn’t join his teammates in hotels and restaurants.

Erskine was on the Dodger team when baseball spread to the West Coast. The Dodgers and the Giants both relocated to California in 1958. Their first game lacked the vocal but loyal crowd of Brooklyn fans and instead attracted curious onlookers such as Bing Crosby and Lana Turner.

A class in baseball history is about more than the game itself. Dirck explains, “[Baseball] is a new and different way to get at basic issues in American history.” These issues include race relations, labor relations, the rise of the urban middle class, baseball as a business, and the role baseball has played in American life as a sport.

As Erskine told Dirck’s students, “The culture of the country is always reflected in sports, but especially in baseball.”