What Education Can Learn From Baseball

By Jose Vilson

A sense of euphoria came over me as I traveled with my students to New York's Citi Field for a game between the New York Mets and the Washington Nationals. A huge fan of the Yankees and of baseball, I had a strange awareness against the sea of orange and blue hats in the brick and steel stadium: The perfectly aligned seats, the well-kept lime-tinted artificial turf, the giant-screen TV pointed to a game many fans consider immaculate at the core.

Baseball’s time-tested simplicity and statistical intricacies have always competed for the adoration of the regular fan. But it wasn’t so long ago when business tainted baseball's majesty. In 1994, Major League Baseball lost most of its credibility after a debilitating players' strike canceled a whole post-season, including the World Series and spring training. While the dauntless few continued their adoration of the game, the regular fan dropped off the sport, favoring basketball or football. Fans protested, the media stoked the fires, and everyone from the commissioner to the players' union felt the sting of allowing this unfiltered game to be sullied by the soot of business.

It made baseball desperate, and many teams gave in to the temptation of exaggerating parts of the game into cartoon-like hyperbole. Players used performance-enhancing drugs to drive more home runs out of the park. Owners used all their resources and then some to land the latest and greatest players, breaking salary records every summer. And my Yankees, known for their braggadocio, signed hugely expensive free agents as a gambit to get their attendance up, but lost successive opportunities to win championships...

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