Would Chaucer have been a good third baseman? Dr. Natalie Grinnell, an expert in both literature and baseball, figures he’d be a pitcher, or maybe a radio commentator. 
 
Grinnell, Wofford’s Reeves Family Professor of Humanities, is a lifelong baseball – specifically Chicago Cubs – fan, and she sees a ballpark full of connections between her favorite sport and her teaching mission. 
 
“When I got here, I found that one of the difficulties in teaching first-year literature classes is that so many students have been taught that they don’t like to read,” she says. “The kinds of content they’ve had hasn’t appealed to their interests. I found that if I had a course and called it Sports Fiction, many people who liked sports would sign up. Then they would find themselves in the literature.” 
But sports and Shakespeare? Yes. 
 
“The questions that come up in Shakespeare or Chaucer about the role of an individual in society, the relationship of a person to family, the struggle between cooperation and competition – all of those things are in every short story or novel about sports,” Grinnell says. “Add in questions about economics, free will, cynicism versus idealism, and I can lure them in to enjoy the reading.” 
 
Grinnell grew up near Cincinnati but became a Cubs fan after going to games with her father and grandfather.  
 
“Every great American author, from Mark Twain to John Updike, felt the need to tell one sports story,” she says. “And baseball is the dominant one in literature because in some ways it’s the most poetic of the popular American sports.”