Reflections Magazine Issue #50 - Spring 1999 | Page 11

More than Statistics
by Br. Frank Rotsaert, C.S.C.

henever anyone asked what I was teaching this past semester, I named the
classes: English 102, Approaches to Literary Criticism, and Literature and
Baseball. Invariably the reaction was, “Literature and Baseball?” The
question mark loomed large.
One of the chief reasons I teach literature and baseball is because everything is there.
It offers the serious reader a broad and wide-ranging insight into what all good
literature presents: we read and discuss issues of racism, good and evil, religion,
women’s struggles for equality, freedom, greed, teamwork, dreams, old age and
youth. The best baseball literature has it all.
I first taught the course two years ago as a way for students to satisfy the General
Education requirement of a literature class. It occurred to me that there was a wealth
of good literature which just happened to have baseball as a major element, much the
same way that there is literature about young people, business, war, show business,
love, and a host of other subjects that cover the range of human life. Why not
literature and baseball?
I could not find the usual literature teacher’s text—a good anthology—so I made my
own. I came up with an abundance of material: 60+ excellent poems, 30 to 40 short
stories, over a dozen high quality novels.
I typed and printed out my own
collection of the best poems and short
stories and selected four paperback
novels: Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum
Slowly, Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The
Celebrant, Robert Coover’s quirky The
Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J.
Henry Waugh, Prop. and, of course, W.
P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe.

Faculty
News

11
Br. Frank’s All-Star Poets
For some summer baseball poetry reading,
Br. Frank recommends these “greatest hits.”
“Letter to Mantsch from Havre,” Richard Hugo
“Season Wish,” Linda Mizejewski
“The Roundhouse Voices,” Dave Smith
“Extra Innings,” Arthur Smith
“Baseball,” Gail Mazur
“Couplet,” Donald Hall
“And the River Gathered Around Us,” Don Johnson

Country Baseball
By Robert Czeiszperger ’00
It’s summer in the country.
My Uncle Joe’s yard, big as a corn field,
The fresh cut grass,
The ground mole tunnels like sinkholes—
All waiting to be trampled upon.
Only two or three people on a side,
My uncle, always there to help us, pitches for both
teams.
We share our gloves as in the old days of baseball
The teams—uneven like a bad haircut
And we always come back for more.

As part of my own preparation for
teaching the course, I attended a two-day
conference at Indiana State University in
Terre Haute and learned that I was not
alone. Such courses were common in
colleges and universities, and they
approached the subject seriously and
with enthusiasm.
My first class had an enrollment of 11 students (ten men, one woman), only four of
them members