Professor E. Michael Brady, Ph.D., a tenured full professor and senior research fellow at the University of Southern Maine, hosts adults and undergrads on a summer bus trip to the nation’s major and minor league baseball parks.
Although he is a huge baseball fan, (Red Sox of course) he is not teaching the fine points of the game, like the infield fly rule or when to put on the “hit and run” play.
Mike Brady is really teaching his students about America and about themselves.
“It is what you learn after you know it all that counts,” said Earl Weaver, former baseball manager.
Each summer, for the past 14 years, Brady has hosted a bus trip through the heart of America taking students from ages 18 to 78 to watch the Red Sox play the Yankees, the Leigh Valley Iron Pigs match with the Columbus Clippers, and the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Norfolk Tides.
Although he admits he is an easy grader, Brady makes his undergraduate students work for their three hours of college credit.
“We have a rule: You don’t get on the bus unless you have read the material,” he said during a lecture Thursday at the Skidompha Library in Damariscotta.
To Brady, baseball is all about America.
“America has grown up with baseball. There are court records in Pittsfield, Mass. Banning kids from playing “base ball” near buildings. It seems they broke out some windows,” he said.
“The Civil War brought what was a New York game to the south when prisoners of war played the game using the New York rules,” he said.
Earlier versions of the game involved something called “Town Ball,” where there were no foul lines and a pitch could be hit in any direction.
A Hall of Fame historian at Cooperstown, NY, helped lead Brady’s class in playing town ball on a recent trip to the baseball shrine.
Brady does not worship at the shrine of Abner Doubleday who may or may not have invented baseball, but he admits Doubleday was a Civil War General on the Union side.
After that national conflict, the nation began to play baseball, and, he says, they adopted the New York style rules in force today.
As the students, who pay almost $2000 for the course, bus from town to town watching games and visiting ball parks, they discuss baseball books, work on papers and journals and discuss history, religion, management and, of course, race.
Speaking to 20 gray-headed ball fans at the library, Brady told of how the classes sat down with Cleveland Indians star, Larry Doby, the first African-American to play in the American League. Doby told them tales of his major league experience and playing in the Negro Leagues.
Brady said his class just missed out on a chance to meet with Hank Aaron, who played with the Negro League’s Indianapolis Clowns before moving on to the majors.
Of course, “Brady’s Bunch” watched games at Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium and Camden Yards in addition to diamonds at Gettysburg, Penn., and South Bend, Ind., where they chatted with the former stars of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League.
Boothbay Harbor’s Bob Paskal, a retired lawyer and judge from St. Louis has taken the course 13 times and says he keeps flunking it so he has to take it again.
Paskal is an authority on the St. Louis Browns, one of, or, he claims, the worst major league team, ever. As he traded baseball yarns with Bob Laird, another former St. Louis resident, the conversation turned to the Brownies and Veeck.
The team’s owner, Bill Veeck, pulled one of the greatest baseball stunts of all time when he signed Eddie Gaedel to a major league contract.
In the middle of a 1951 double header with the Detroit Tigers, Veeck inserted Gaedel as a batter. He didn’t bother to tell anyone that Gaedel was a 3’7″ dwarf. Gaedel, wearing a uniform with 1/8 on the back, drew a walk and got on base.
“Veeck was scared to death Gaedel, who jumped out of a cake at the beginning of the game, would try to hit the ball so he told him he was going to watch from the clubhouse roof. He said he would carry a shotgun and would shoot Gaedel if he swung at a pitch,” said Paskal.
One of the reasons Brady’s class is so great is that it involves intergenerational learning, said Paskal.
“Talking about and learning about something they both love is a precious thing,” he said.
Like many college professors, at the end of the session, Brady asks his students to evaluate the course and his teaching.
“One student wrote: ‘I hope heaven turns out to be like this course,'” Brady said.
Brady’s course is taught every summer. Information on the course, Baseball and American Society: A Journey, can be obtained from the University of Southern Maine.
