For those of you who have met me
before it is obvious that baseball runs my life. From the daily work that goes into my
involvement with the local youth league, the Rockville Baseball Association,
even to the clothes I wear, baseball is almost always the constant. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that for
my History 391 internship I would do something baseball related.
This past summer I had the great
honor to work with the Hyannis Harbor Hawks, one of the 10 teams that make up
the Cape Cod Baseball League. The Cape
Cod Baseball League, or Cape League as its more often referred to, is the
premier amateur baseball showcase in the entire country, having launched the
careers of hundreds of professional players.
The league estimates that out of the 750 players on current rosters of
Major League Baseball teams, one in six spent at least one summer on the Cape,
including current stars like Aaron Judge, Jackie Bradley Jr, and Kyle
Freeland. The reach of the Cape League
isn’t just current either, for more than 100 years the league has consistently
been sending the very best of collegiate players onto the pros like Robin
Ventura, Jason Veritek, and Frank Thomas .
Reading through this post you might
be asking yourself, how does a history major end up in sports? How is it possible that history and sports go
together? The field of sports history is
one of the fastest growing in historical research and preservation. Places like the Baseball Hall of Fame in
Cooperstown, or the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, need historical researchers
the same way more traditional fields do, perhaps the Halls of Fame need them more
than traditional fields because the field is trying to catch up. There are several main skills that historians
offer that these organizations take advantage of, one is the ability to do
critical research and determine facts, presenting false stories and narratives
from taking root and permeating through the entirety of the organization (and
possibly sport) in question. Sports
history organizations also exist to tell the stories of sport and to relate it
to the public at large, since this is what public historians excel at it is a
natural fit for them to become involved with these organizations. Another way these organizations need
historians is to help preserve the actual documents and artifacts themselves so
that they can be seen by generations down the road and not just those who were
there to see the history happen.
As a
baseball fan it is a tremendous opportunity to be able to observe the best of
the best in college baseball, many of whom will soon play at the next
level. But it is an even more tremendous
opportunity to work with one of the 10 teams, as the league not only has a
reputation for sending players to the ranks of the professionals, but also
their interns. This summer I worked as
an adjunct broadcaster creating a weekly podcast about the team and its history
called Birds the Word (available wherever podcasts can be found), a
photographer documenting the season, a researcher putting together the team’s
history, and also one of the team’s main scorekeepers. All of these duties led to the creation and
discovery of a trove of artifacts and documents from the teams history that had
never before been seen publicly. Even
after my internship concluded, these items are going through the process of
preservation and are to be released to the public within the next few years, or
become part of the Cape Leagues Hall of Fame collection when it eventually
reopens, meaning my work over the summer provided a direct impact on the
history of the league and what we know about the teams within it.
This
experience was one like no other, working in close quarters with the best of
the best form around the country and being under the direct supervision of the
Director of Interns Laurie Pfeffer, and Judy Walden Scarafile, one of the most
well-known baseball executives in the country, a tireless advocate for women in
the sports world, and a baseball Hall of Famer.
It was an experience to build connections with people from all across
the country (and at home, a player from the UMBC baseball team played on the
Cape this summer!), with Major League Baseball Scouts and Executives, and learn
more about the team that I have rooted for over a decade. It was truly a formative experience, and I
for one am glad that I had the opportunity to participate in it.
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