Back from the Coop

As in Cooperstown, where I attended the 25th Baseball Symposium, May 29-31.

I hadn’t been to one of those things in almost 20 years and it’s grown substantially. My last time there were about 50 hard-core baseball scholars; this time it was (guessing here) closer to 150. The topics were quite eclectic and, to be honest, daunting. You think yo know a lot about the sport, only to discover you’re an “amateur.” I moderated one session: “Organizing the Players: Unions in baseball History.” Thank goodness I just had to introduce the speakers and not actually know anything about the topic. I was awed by the scholarship of the presenters and felt most unworthy.

Here’s a sampling of the presentations, which reflects a dizzying range of interests:

• Jackie Robinson, Integration, and the Negro Leagues…More Disguise Than Blessing?
• Paul Robeson and Baseball: In Fact and Fiction
• Horace Stoneham and Breaking Baseball’s Second Color Line
• The Mystery of Curt Flood: Baseball Persistent Enigma
• Take Me Out to the Hearings: Major League Baseball Players Before Congress
• Baseball and the Red Scare: Chavez Ravine, Frank Wilkinson, and Baseball During the Time of the Red Scare
• Playing Ball “Over There”: Clark Griffith’s Ball and Bat Fund
• Battered but not Broken: Baseball and Masculinity at Tule Lake, 1942-1946
• Mythmaking and the Archetypical Hero: Mickey Mantle in the Pages of the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, 1951-1956
• God Bless Whose América? Retrieving the Subversive Memory of Roberto Clemente
• ‘a Slipping, ‘a Ripping, and ‘a Tripping: Mother Hubbard Baseball, Social Inversion and the Carnivalesque in Fin de Siècle America
• Out in the Outfield: A Short History of Baseball and the LGBTQ Community
• Unleveled Fields, Re-Appropriated Dreams: Baseball, Black Women and the Politics of Representation
• Texas Bluebonnets – It’s Our National Game Too: Professional Women’s Baseball in The 20th Century
• The Shutout: American Women and the National Pastime
• 125 Years of “Casey at the Bat” and One Fortnight of Team Israel in the WBC: Rediscovering the Classic in Baseball
• The Uniqueness of Baseball as an American Sport: A Psycho-Biblical Analysis
• Chivalrous Contest: The Massachusetts Game in Worcester County
• The Legacy of the Draper and Maynard Sporting Goods Factory: Its Impact on the Future of the Sport World
• The Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say About Baseball: How George Carlin Explains the Relative Absence of Fan Violence in American Spectator Sports
• The First Decade of Baseball in Philippines Education, 1900-1910
• Clash of Cultures: The Assimilation of Asian Baseball Players into Major League Baseball and the Minor League System
• Lou’s on First: Rediscovering Baseball as Popular Culture, Who’s on First, and the Comedy and Tragedy of Abbott and Costello
• The Baseball Project: Baseball History and Culture Meet Rock n’ Roll
• Baseball Comes Back to Brooklyn: Coney Island and the Brooklyn Cyclones
• “You Should Have Seen It”: Nostalgia As Baseball History
• Pine Tar and the Infield Fly Rule: An Umpires Perspective on the Hart-Dworkin Debate
• Baseball and American Culture
• Why Bother?: Why Bother Having Scouts When We Have Sabermetrics?
• The Future of Baseball Statistical Analysis
• Baseball and Tammany Hall
• Greenberg at the Bat: A Twenty-First Century Moonlight Graham
• Baseball Ethics and Presidential Politics: What Candidates May Learn from America’s National Pastime

Of course, my favorite panel was the one on  “Baseball and Biography,” featuring “From the Inside Looking Out: Confessional Memoirs from the Yankee Dugout”; “Writing Charlie Hustle: “The Pete Rose Story” and Autobiographical Image Making” (who knew Rose “wrote” seven autobio/memoirs); and “The Glory Years of the Baltimore Orioles and the Five General Managers Who Led Them, 1960-1983.” The last was by Lee Lowenfish, author of an award-winning bio on Branch Rickey.

As posted on Facebook last week, the trip to the Hall of Fame also gave me the opportunity to donate a copy of 501 Baseball Books to the Library. Here I am exchanging autographed books with Tim Wiles, Director of Research, who, with a couple of other gentlemen, wrote the definitive book on “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” which celebrated its centennial a few years back.

I also took the opportunity to stroll down Main Street, visiting the various baseball-themed stores, many of which duplicate efforts to an amazing degree. Some of the proprietors were nice enough to let me interview them on vide. I’ll be working on that in the days (and weeks) ahead, so stay tuned.