The president of a university is a powerful person. He or she may live a very busy lifestyle that can often lead to warranted seclusion. They become something like a legend; heard from, but not seen. However, for President Kimball running California Lutheran University is about something much more than just managing the day-to-day operations. It is about forming relationships and connections with the students and the best way to do that is by stepping into the classroom.

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning of the 2016 spring semester, President Kimball guides his honors class into the exploration of history through baseball. Although the class is baseball themed, it is not meant as a means for studying the game’s statistical history, instead the course uses baseball to explore America’s deeper historical past.

“Walt Whitman once called baseball ‘America’s game.’ In the century since Whitman uttered those words, baseball has occupied a prominent place in American life in some ways equivalent to business, politics, religion and race. In this course, then, we will examine the relationship between the United States and its national pastime,” Kimball said in an email interview.

Some of the topics the class swings at are labor relations, the impact of television, the “color line” and the role of ethnicity and ethic rivalry.

This is not the first time President Kimball has stepped into a classroom. Back at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, he taught a very similarily instructed baseball history course.

Michaela Reaves, who is chair of the history department, originally had the idea to have President Kimball teach a history through baseball class at Cal Lutheran.