Professor Jay Martin
Authors Baseball Magic

Professor of government Jay Martin has authored Baseball Magic (Pocol Press, 2008), a collection of 11 short fictional baseball stories. While researching and writing his upcoming book, Live All You Can: Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr.: Inventor of Modern Baseball (Columbia Press), the concept for the short-story collection came to Martin, based in part on his experiences as a baseball fan in high school.
Ronald Gottesman, editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, describes Martin's baseball stories as "refined and simple, brutal and gentle.
"This book," notes Gottesman, "doesn't need any performance-enhancing drugs or hormones. It is a genuine thing in itself, about the best of our games."
Martin considers the history of baseball in Hawaii a "neglected subject." During the course of his research, he happened upon more than 2,000 manuscript letters of Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr., a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame since 1938, and believed by most to be the "Father of Modern Baseball." Credited for regularizing the rules of baseball in 1845, he spent much of his career and life in Hawaii.
Martin is turning his research on Cartwright Jr. into a biography on the Hall of Famer this fall, with an expected December 2008 release date.
In addition, the CMC professor is working on a book examining the history of Hawaiian baseball, followed by a pictorial history of baseball in Hawaii. Because so little attention has been paid to the history of baseball in Hawaii, Martin considers himself to be an evolving expert on the subject.
Next spring, his interests will intertwine with his classroom syllabus when he teaches a new course in government: Politics and Law in American Sports. He said he also hopes to teach a freshman seminar that would be called, The History of Sports in Literature and Culture.