Baseball energizes registrar

Registrar Monty Nielsen examines an old ceramic trophy from his baseball memorabilia collection.

Buried deep in Monty Nielsen’s vita is a curious reference to baseball.

At first glance, the reference seems quite out of place. After all, he is UW–Madison’s new registrar, and university registrars are supposed to write papers and make presentations on such topics as “statewide time-to-degree legislation,” “transfer articulation agreements” and “re-engineering student records systems.”

But baseball? What does being a registrar have to do with baseball? Everything, if you’re Nielsen. Spend but a few minutes with this guy, and you’ll realize he really, really, loves the game.

“I’m a lunatic on this stuff,” says the 49-year-old Nielsen, only partly in jest.

The curious vita reference lists Nielsen’s co-authorship of a paper examining professional baseball players as heroes and role models. He presented the paper at a 1989 symposium held in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Penned with George Schubert, former dean of university college and summer sessions at the University of North Dakota, the paper was also included as a chapter in Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and the American Culture 1989. The book was published by Meckler Corporation, in association with State University of New York College at Oneonta.

Nielsen noticed the symposium’s call for papers while working as director of admissions and records at UND in Grand Forks. He brainstormed with Schubert and others, “and out came this idea of baseball players as role models.”

Nielsen and Schubert constructed a survey to determine if baseball players are and should be role models. They queried 100 current and former major league baseball players who had competed as far back as the 1950s. They also queried 100 non-players either affiliated with baseball or in leadership positions in education, journalism and politics.

Seventeen players or former players responded, including Rich Ashburn, Bob Feller, Steve Garvey, Ralph Kiner, Tony LaRussa, Brooks Robinson and Enos Slaughter. Twenty-nine non-players responded, including President Gerald Ford and former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who before entering politics played second base in the Pittsburgh Pirates minor league system.

Writing the paper and getting it published resurrected Nielsen’s baseball passion that was cultivated on the windswept farm fields of southern Nebraska.

“The book became a defining moment for me,” he says. “It gave me a new perspective on baseball. As a kid, I had hopes and dreams of being the next Mickey Mantle … during that time, baseball really was America’s pastime. It was something I could really relate to, and it gave me something interesting to talk about with my dad. But as life evolves and you go through stages of life, you can forget about baseball. That could have happened to me.”

But it didn’t. There’s no memory loss for Nielsen. As he talks, the childhood experiences come to life and tumble down out of his mind. Soon, they are rocketing at you, like fastballs from Roger Clemens.

Playing ball at school recess. Collecting baseball cards. Subscribing to Sport magazine. Buying The Sporting News with his allowance. Rooting for his first favorite team, the 1959 Chicago White Sox. Convincing his parents to let him stay home from school so he could watch on TV the seventh game of the 1960 World Series between the Pirates and the New York Yankees. (In that famous game, Pirate second baseman Bill Mazeroski homered in the bottom of the ninth to clinch the championship). Watching the Superior Senators, his hometown’s minor league farm team of the Washington Senators.

Back then, lots of small towns across America fielded minor league baseball teams. Back then, just about every kid played the game. Back then, baseball ruled.

It doesn’t anymore. Nielsen acknowledges it is no longer America’s pastime. Baseball’s piece of the national fabric has frayed over the years, from the growth of other professional and college sports, exorbitant player salaries and the hurly-burly pace of life.

But, as the boys of summer prepare to embark on another season, baseball is still popular. It is still helping parents and their children connect, as it did for Nielsen and his father, and later for Nielsen and his son and daughter.

Record numbers of fans turned out last season to watch Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chase Roger Maris’ single-season home-run record. McGwire’s 70 home runs, and Sosa’s 66, helped fans forget the disastrous 1994 strike-shortened season.

Many people in and out of the game view McGwire and Sosa as positive role models. And according to the majority of responses from Nielsen’s survey, most professional baseball players are and should be viewed as role models.

That’s a position with which Nielsen agrees. But striving to be a positive example to young people should not just be limited to professional baseball players, he adds.

“I think everyone should be a role model,” he says.