At first glance, it sounds like some academic’s idea of a joke.
The title of a paper being presented later this month at ac conference at Indiana State University is “The Spitball and Urban America: Anti-Heroes, Fair Play and Public Hygiene.”
But Kevin Grace, the paper’s author, is serious. And he knows about the spitter — not to mention the posterboy for the outlawed pitch, Gaylord Perry — which makes Grace a perfect presenter at the sixth Conference on Baseball in Literature and Culture, March 30 in Terre Haute.
The conference, held each year just before the start of the baseball season, draws academics, historians and fans for a day of presentations, discussions and guest speakers. And this year, after lunch, they can learn all about the fabled spitball.
“These conferences are a lot of fun,” says Grace, who teaches Sports in Society courses at the University of Cincinnati. “They have some different kinds of papers. Last year there was a really good one on how the sinking of the Titanic actually led to the lifting of the ban on Sunday baseball in New York.”
More on the Titanic later. First, though, the spitball and public hygiene?
“One of the things I focus on in the class is baseball and American vice, which includes gambling, cheating, substance abuse, alcohol, whatever,” says Grace.
The spitball slips neatly into his realm of expertise. The pitch was banned by professional baseball in 1920, in part, Grace says, because the sport wanted to present a strong public health image (the great flu epidemic, which had killed some 40 million people worldwide just two years earlier, was still fresh in everyone’s mind). Although the spitball became illegal, pitchers continued to throw it surreptitiously — there’s hardly a pitcher alive who didn’t experiment with it sometime during his career — and achieve hero status in the process.
Grace cites former major-leaguer Perry, whose 22-year hall-of-fame career was marked by constant allegations that he used illegal pitches. The popular Perry wasn’t bothered by the accusations; he claimed it gave him an edge over opponents who were more concerned with catching him loading up the ball than they were with hitting him (he also titled his autobiography “Me and the Spitter”).
“Since the pitch was banned,” Grace says, “the spitballer has been considered a romantic outlaw type. And everybody roots for him. Unless you’re a batter.”
When these conferences began, they were skewed more toward literature. Now, though, popular culture seems to dominate, though literature is still represented.
One such paper, being presented by Todd Paul Avery, is “The Girls In Europe are Nuts Over Ball Players: Virginia Woolf Goes to Bat for Ring Lardner in Terre Haute.”
Avery, a recent grad student who teaches in the English department at Indiana University, specializes in late 19th and early 20th Century British literature. Hence, his knowledge of Woolf, the British author and critic. He’s also a baseball fan (“a frustrated Red Sox fan . . . always hoping, still hoping”), explaining his familiarity with Lardner, the one-time Chicago Tribune baseball writer and sports columnist.
Woolf, Avery says, wrote an essay in 1925 called “American Fiction,” and among the writers she commented on was Lardner, praising his work “You Know Me Al” (He had “talents of a remarkable order,” she wrote). The 1916 book is a collection of pieces Lardner wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, presenting a portrait of a young, semi-literate White Sox pitcher told through his letters home.
Avery combined his interests and came up with the topic for his presentation.
“The first letter is actually [written from] Terre Haute, Ind.,” Avery says. “I had heard about the baseball conference, which was going to be in Terre Haute, around the same time I just by chance had picked up `You Know Me Al’ to read for the first time. And I’d been working on Woolf, obviously, for quite a long time. So these three things came together just in time to send a proposal to the conference.”
Another literature-themed paper is being presented by William W. Wright, an assistant professor of English at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colo. The title is “Complaint and Optimism in Baseball Autobiographies.”
In it, Wright explains that baseball autobiographies borrow metaphors of the game in an effort to explain a life to both the writer and readers. “Lives, like our own, that include false starts, lost friends, conflicting opinion, and chaotic experience can make a clearer sense and argument when told in terms of baseball, and so we willingly borrow the metaphors of the game to explain ourselves,” he wrote in the abstract outlining the paper he will present. “Often those explanations swing between complaint about the present and optimism for both the past and the future.”
Sounds like pretty heavy stuff to those whose involvement in baseball doesn’t go much deeper than a 16-ounce Old Style at the ballpark.
Remember, though, that Wright and the other presenters at the conference aren’t there primarily as academics.
“I think I’m a fan first, certainly, and then an academic,” he says.
A total of 20 papers are on the schedule this year, including “Keeping It in the Park, or Why Poets Don’t Dig the Long Ball,” “The Baseball Hero in Film,” “The Beloit Fairies — An Early 20th Century Outstanding Semi-Pro Baseball Team,” “How I Found Religion at a Baseball Game,” and “Merkle and Doyle: The Young and the Reckless in the 1908 Pennant Race.”
At last year’s conference, presentations included ” `Unbelievable!’ The Poetry of Phil Rizzuto” “Playing the Subs: Teaching a Course on Literature and Baseball to Those Who Wouldn’t Read a Book If You Paid Them,” “Baseball, Culture and the Republic” (which from its title seemed to have covered all the bases), and “The Sinking of The Titanic and New York City Baseball.” In the latter, presenter Robert S. Brown explained how a benefit game for Titanic survivors was played on a Sunday in New York, which like many cities early in the 20th Century didn’t allow Sunday baseball. The success of the game, Brown explained, opened the door for the abolition of the no-Sunday-baseball law.
“There are a lot of good papers that are delivered there,” says Frank Rotsaert, a professor at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Mich., who presented the “Teaching a Course on Literature and Baseball” paper last year, based on a class he has taught at the school. “You never go there and hear things on statistics or things like that.”
“We’ll get everything from somebody who writes a pretty conventional literary paper on, say, metaphors in `The Natural’ to something like one paper that was proposed by a dentist on the harmfulness of chewing tobacco,” says Pete Carino, a professor of English at Indiana State who founded the conference but who’ll be absent this year because he’s teaching in Italy.
Carino got the idea for the conference from similar events held annually in Arizona and in Cooperstown, N.Y., site of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“We decided to try one here,” he says, “and the first year we were sort of fortunate to have Carl Erskine [the former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher] fall into our lap as our speaker because he was a friend of the university president.”
Since then, they’ve had an ex-player as the luncheon speaker every year. This year it’s former Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher Dock Ellis; author and poet Donald Hall will deliver the keynote address. The names help get attention and draw crowds — about 65 people attended last year, which is typical, according to Michael Spinks, an adjunct faculty member in ISU’s English and Communications Department. Spinks is helping run the conference in Carino’s absence.
In addition to broadening one’s horizons, listening to Ellis and Hall and enjoying lunch, attendees get to meet with like-minded individuals. And we’re not talking about a room full of Cubs fans whining about Mark Grace’s departure.
Rotsaert, for example, says that his presentation last year afforded him the opportunity to make some professional contacts and meet people whose first question, when they learn he teaches a course on literature and baseball, isn’t “Oh, do you teach `Casey at the Bat’?”
“You get to talk with people who are trying to do the same thing you’re doing,” he says. “From that conference I got somebody from the University of San Francisco who wanted to see my syllabus. So it’s really worthwhile.”
For more information on the Conference on Baseball in Literature and Culture, contact Michael Spinks at 812-237-7637, or go to http://sapphire.indstate.edu/(tilde)spinksm/index.htm.
