The ballpark as subversive arts and science classroom

Another Major League Baseball season has arrived, along with another year of hope for the Seattle Mariners. From the chill of early spring to the long shadows of autumn, the 162-game schedule will deliver many thrills and memorable moments courtesy of Julio Rodriguez, Cal Raleigh, J.P. Crawford and company. Beyond entertainment, however, the baseball season offers a hidden bonus: It can also serve as a virtual summer school for young fans, sparking an interest in math, science, literature, history, and speech.

When I was a grade schooler, baseball statistics helped me penetrate the mystery of fractions and long division. The seeming illogic of a smaller number divided by a larger number suddenly became clear in 1960 when I realized that Willie Mays’ 190 hits divided by his 595 at bats yielded a .317 batting average. The scales fell from my eyes: Fractions and percentages are simply batting averages!

For older students, baseball’s advanced analytics provide a virtual STEM sequence of calculus, physics, geometry, trigonometry, and probability. The alphabet soup of sabermetrics — such as Wins Above Replacement Value (WAR), Weighted Runs Created (wRC+), and Average Exit Velocity (aVE) — allows students to visualize statistical abstractions as real-world athletic feats. Physics is a lot more fun when it takes the form of a Julio Rodriguez 400-hundred-foot home run with a launch angle of 12 degrees and an exit velocity of 97 miles per hour.

Baseball also offers a rich liberal arts curriculum. As a young reader, it served as an effective vocabulary builder as I pored over game summaries and feature stories in the daily newspaper. As I grew more interested in writing, legendary baseball scribes like Red Smith, Jim Murray and Roger Angell taught me to appreciate irony, satire, and metaphor. (Angell once described a baseball box score as “my favorite urban flower.”) I went on to discover celebrated novelists and poets (Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Mark Harris, Marianne Moore) who used baseball as a backdrop to explore the human condition.

Viewing history through the lens of baseball adds color and context to our national story. Babe Ruth’s gaudy exploits illuminate the Roaring Twenties. Jackie Robinson’s pioneering journey animates America’s history of race relations. The volatile Oakland A’s of the early 1970s embody the social and political turmoil of that era. Today’s free-agent marketplace mirrors the ambitions and excesses of 21st-century capitalism. As the French-born historian Jacques Barzun observed, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

Lastly, the language of baseball can open young people’s minds to the power and charm of the spoken word. The long, slow unwinding of a baseball season allows ample time for reflective observation and comment. The sport has provided a treasury of linguistic gifts from the comical to the profound. Yogi Berra once quipped about a popular New York restaurant, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” Legendary broadcaster Vin Scully wistfully described the inevitable rise and fall of a baseball career as “a mere moment in a man’s life between an all-star game and an old-timer’s game.” A dying Lou Gehrig gallantly told a hushed Yankee Stadium crowd of 65,000 well-wishers, “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

Baseball can be a cleverly subversive way for teachers, parents and grandparents to encourage childhood learning in the summer months — in a 45,000-seat schoolhouse with a cafeteria that serves hot dogs, peanuts, and Cracker Jack.