This week on the Lectures and History podcast, Boston College Communications Professor

Michael Sarazio explores how baseball connects Americans to their past and culture. The game was born

on June 19, 1846, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the New York

9 beat the Knickerbockers

23 to 1 in just four innings. A game historians consider the birthplace of baseball. Professor Sarazio's

latest book is The Power of Sports, Media, and Spectacle in American Culture. It examines how

sports reflect and shape American life, from journalism and politics to commercialism and gender.

And a note to our listeners.

With the academic year now wrapped, lectures and history will pause new episodes until September.

Over the summer, we'll revisit some of our most interesting past lectures and other history-related content.

This episode was originally on the feed in October of 2024.

Professor Sarazio's lecture begins after this.

Great, awesome. Welcome, gang. This is a different setting for us. But I hope you guys,

hope you guys had a wonderful week. We're going to dive right into the material today because we're

going to try to keep it to about an hour.

Conversation today is going to be all about baseball and the chapter that I had you read for today had quite a lot of material in it.

We will try to break down as always the sort of most important themes and the most kind of relevant details that we're going to try to emphasize here today.

As usual, we'll start off with some teaser questions.

Such questions as, did the pitch clock destroy baseball's soul?

Or did it save it?

Why are baseball players the most superstitious weirdos of all athletes across the spectrum of sports?

And is the game of baseball still relevant

...