LEWISTON – Anyone who thinks baseball is just a game can learn a lot from Mike Brady

Every year, Brady conducts a nationally honored travel course called “Baseball and American Society: A Journey.” It’s an intense tour of minor and major league cities that places solid academic demands on participants.

Brady told a Great Falls Forum audience at the Lewiston Public Library’s Marsden Hartley Cultural Center Thursday about the unique approach and multi-level benefits of the University of Southern Maine program.

The course probes the historic and cultural significance of the national pastime. It examines subjects including race, gender, stadium architecture, business aspects of baseball, careers and ethics of the sport.

The trip stays firmly focused on learning, Brady said.

“It’s not a party, folks,” he said. “The bus is a rolling classroom.”

In various cities, there are conferences with coaches, former players and front-office staff. This year’s stops will include Cleveland, Milwaukee and the Field of Dreams in Iowa, as well as the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Five major league games and several minor league games are on the itinerary.

Brady, who is a professor of adult education at USM, said a bus trip to several ball parks with his father in the early 1990s led to his idea for the course.

“We had the experience, but we missed the meaning,” he said.

As an educator, he said he realized the depth of learning that could take place in a trip built around traditional academic components. He proposed the program to USM in 1996 and has been co-facilitating the course ever since.

To be accepted, applicants have advance reading to do. They must complete writing assignments and oral presentations.

Brady said about 20 percent of the participants are women, and they often bring a son or daughter.

Brady also talked about baseball at the time of the Civil War. He said participants on a trip toured the Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. It was there they learned that the Civil War played a role in the game becoming the national pastime.

Abner Doubleday, who was a major general of the Union Army at Gettysburg, has been credited with inventing baseball, although Doubleday never made that claim.

“Baseball was mostly a New York game,” Brady told the audience. When captured Union soldiers went to prison camps of the Confederacy, residents of the South got their first look at baseball. They began playing the game, and it began to spread throughout the country.

Feedback after every summer’s tour is always enthusiastic, Brady said.

After one trip, a participant wrote, “I hope heaven turns out to be like this course.”

Commenting on the current state of baseball, Brady said, “I think baseball players ought to take themselves more seriously as role models and as potential heroes for kids. They really have a presence beyond the game.”

Nevertheless, he doesn’t believe baseball is headed for a crisis.

“Baseball is so deeply entrenched in the culture that it will survive, and has survived, even stupider owners and stupider players. I’m not worried about it,” he said.