Download a high-resolution photograph of Bruce Oppenheimer.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. ñ Political science books fill one wall of Bruce
Oppenheimer’s office in Calhoun Hall at Vanderbilt University. Across
the room, a comparatively tiny bookcase is stuffed with works like
Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer and three videotape installments of
HBO’s When It was a Game.
It’s the space reserved for baseball.
Oppenheimer, an oft-quoted expert on politics in the media, has another
passion that he shares with students during Maymester. That’s when he
teaches his popular "Baseball in American Life" course. The class runs
from May 10 to June 4.
"Some of them think it’s only going to be about baseball, but then they
get exposed to all sorts of things they weren’t expecting," Oppenheimer
said. "They read some good literature. Some of it gets quantitativeówe
look at how to measure merit, since that’s such a big part of baseball.
They learn a little about statistics and probability. We take a look at
baseball films made from books, what they change and why they change it.
"We look not only at Jackie Robinson, we look at Hank Greenberg
(baseball’s first Jewish star), and we talk about assimilation in
baseball and acceptance into American society of various ethnic groups."
Many students try their hand at writing baseball fiction as their final project.
"Some of the great authors in American literature, and especially
contemporary American literature, have written baseball fiction,"
Oppenheimer said. "That includes James Thurber, Philip Roth, Bernard
Malamud and Daymon Runyan. Walt Whitman wrote about baseball. He was a
sportswriter early on."
Oppenheimer, a Brooklyn Dodgers fan as a youth and co-author of three
books including Congress Reconsidered (with Lawrence Dodd) and Sizing
up the Senate (with Frances Lee), earned his master’s and doctorate in
political science at the University of Wisconsin. He was player-manager
of a slow-pitch softball student team there that won a summer
championship.
"We didn’t look like much of a team," he said. "We had a third baseman
with arthritic knees and a second baseman that would go 5-for-5, but
ran flat-footed and looked like he was walking around the bases. I was
a left fielder who had no range but could throw. My strength as a
manager was that I knew when to take myself out."
Around that time, he began investigating baseball novels and films.
"Some (baseball novels) are good fiction," he said. "Some are good
baseball. A much smaller number are both good fiction and good
baseball."
One of Oppenheimer’s favorites is The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.: J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover.
"It’s about a man who develops a board game of baseball and it just
takes over his life," Oppenheimer said. "It’s good fiction and good
baseball. Coover had to really know baseball to write that bookóseasons
and careers and probabilities."
Oppenheimer also recommends four books by Mark Harris, beginning with
The Southpaw and including Bang the Drum Slowly, which was made into
one of the better baseball films, starring Robert De Niro and Michael
Moriarty.
The class compares the dark tone of Malamud’s novel The Natural with
the optimistic feel of the film version starring Robert Redford. The
hero strikes out in the pivotal scene in the book. In the film, he hits
a home run.
"Baseball is better suited to storytelling than other sports, I think,"
Oppenheimer said. "It’s a game with pauses in it, where you can have
conversations about just about anything. There are also those long road
trips that have this sort of barnstorming vagabond sense to them."
Oppenheimer is teaching the "Baseball in American Life" course for the
fourth time this May. Last year, so many students signed up that he had
to teach it in shifts.
"There’s almost no political science involved in this, which is
probably one reason I enjoy doing it," he said. "I’ll work on this
class in the morning and work on my political science research in the
afternoon. As long as it’s fun and doesn’t take up too much time from
my other professional interests, I’ll keep doing it."
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu