A New Kind Of Academic Field
Between the books on the subject that adorn his shelves and the photos of the game that cover his walls, University Professor Sol Gittleman's Ballou office tells you that he loves baseball. So getting the opportunity to teach a history course on the game was something the former Tufts provost says he "never even could have dreamed of." "Baseball was always part of my life," Gittleman says. "But I never made the academic fusion until five years ago, and when I did, I said, 'This is going to be fun!'" Gittleman's History of Baseball course is one of three relatively new classes at Tufts relating to America's pastime, along with Professor Gerald Gill's History of Sports in America and a baseball statistics class taught by lecturers Andy Andres (N'99), David Tybor (N'03, M'03) and Tufts information systems specialist Morgan Melchiorre. Like most of their students, all of the professors share a love for the game and a vast knowledge of it. "You walk around and you talk to people about what you do and you say 'Yeah, I teach a course in baseball,' and they think that you're a coach or something," explains Andres. "Then you go, 'No, I'm teaching the next round of [Red Sox general manager] Theo Epsteins how to be Theo Epstein.'" However, don't make the mistake of thinking that Gill's classroom is merely a forum to chat about the Red Sox or that Gittleman spends class time regaling students with personal anecdotes about his efforts to play professional ball ("A scout told me, 'You're a nice kid, but you can't field, you can't hit, and you can't run,'" he recalls). To these professors, baseball is serious business. "The baseball part is fun and it's vital, but the history is the most important part," insists Gittleman, who says his students often come in knowing nothing about the game's off-field history and leave having read serious academic books about baseball and having written 30-page research papers. "I want them to understand the outside context – progression, depression, race, integration, economics, labor, the Supreme Court. I want my students to leave my class as scholarly American historians." Gill agrees, noting that sports can be an interesting lens through which to view history – particularly during the period of the semester devoted to baseball, when he shows off his ever-growing personal collection of Negro League caps and jerseys. "Sports are a business so you can talk about economic history," he explains. "Most sports have evolved from urban affairs so you can talk about urban history. Certainly you can talk about race and ethnicity and gender – where sports have reflected the biases of society and also where they've been a forefront for change." Gill's class has proved to be popular since it became widely offered in 2001, with all 70 spots routinely filled. Gittleman's course is similarly popular, with more than 100 undergraduates trying to find a spot in his 15-person class this semester. And when the baseball statistics course was first offered in Fall 2004, nearly 50 students showed up wanting to fill the 20 seats. Tybor says he gets e-mails from students at universities across the country who have heard about the class and want to take it somehow. "It's pretty cool to know that Tufts has something that you can get in very few other places," he says.  "You walk around and you talk to people about what you do and you say 'Yeah, I teach a course in baseball,' and they think that you're a coach or something," explains lecturer Andy Andres (N'99). "Then you go, 'No, I'm teaching the next round of [Red Sox general manager] Theo Epsteins how to be Theo Epstein.'" "The Analysis of Baseball: Statistics and Sabermetrics," offered through the Experimental College, teaches students the evolving science of assessing player performance, but also helps foster a deeper appreciation for the game. "It's a beautiful thing to watch, but you can also understand it by getting in there and using some basic quantitative skills," says Tybor, who is currently pursuing his doctorate in nutritional epidemiology at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Andres, who got his PhD from the Friedman School in 1999 and is currently an assistant professor at Boston University, and Tybor pitched the idea of a class on sabermetrics – the popularized term for the statistical analysis applied to baseball – to the ExCollege, which loved it from the start. Andres also credits the legacy of people like Gittleman for helping make the class a reality. "There's this history of baseball scholarship at Tufts," he says. In only its second year, the class has made a tangible impact – in addition to mentions in The New York Times and Newsweek, four students presented their class research projects at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) convention in Toronto this summer. "I wanted them to really have the chance to go push themselves to the limit and maybe get some new publishable work out there," says Andres. Junior Matt Gallagher and sophomore Peter Bendix presented "The Leo Mazzone Effect," examining the influence of the Atlanta Braves' pitching coach on his hurlers, while senior Jesse Gerner and junior Noah Kaufman presented the "The Green Monster Effect," evaluating how Fenway Park's one-of-a-kind left field wall affects run output. For Gerner – who has already worked at Cooperstown, NESN, and The Boston Globe's sports department and is aiming for a front-office baseball job – learning and utilizing complex statistical principles was a unique and valuable opportunity. He and Kaufman tried to determine the influence of Fenway Park's short left field and high wall. "We looked at 10 years of data: singles hit to left field with runners on base, and the percentage of runners that scored at Fenway as opposed to other major league parks," Gerner says, noting that there were about 10 percent fewer runs scored at Fenway. The complicated formulas employed by these students are a far cry from your standard newspaper box score. Senior Mike DeBartolo, who took the class last year, gives an example: "Equivalent Average: a measure of total offensive value per out, with corrections for league offensive level, home park and team pitching. EqA considers batting as well as baserunning, but not the value of a position player's defense. The EqA adjusted for all-time also has a correction for league difficulty. The scale is deliberately set to approximate that of batting average." Got all that? It's enough to silence anyone who might wonder about the merit of introducing baseball studies into an academic curriculum. "It's an in-depth statistics class," DeBartolo says. "It's just applied to baseball instead of business." And if you want to go beyond statistics and history, Gill believes baseball can teach many other important concepts. "Baseball is supposed to teach us about teamwork, fair play, courage, determination, never giving up," he enumerates. "These are values every coach from little league on up tries to instill. These are values to emulate, a creed for life." More: Introduction | Red Sox Nation, Tufts Chapter Profile written by Ben Hoffman, Class of 2006 Ben Hoffman, a native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is an English major and communications and media studies minor. Ben has been a sports editor at the Tufts Daily for the past two years, and last fall he served as the head of the sports department. He also interned for the Boston Globe in the fall before studying abroad in Prague in the spring. Portrait photos by Aaron Schutzengel (Class of 2007) and Brian Loeb (Class of 2006). Classroom photos by Nicki Sobecki (Class of 2008) This story originally ran on Sept. 26, 2005 |
 "There's a lot of people [at Tufts] who are intelligently passionate," says senior Jesse Gerner. "They're not just Sox fans for the sake of being Sox fans. They know the team, they understand the game, not just from a Red Sox standpoint, so you're able to have intelligent baseball discussions with them." |
|
|
