When Mick Chantler was a young boy, his father taught him how to play baseball; they used to listen to games together on the radio, and Mick had a baseball card collection. It was a time of hometown heroes and hometown teams. "I've loved baseball all my life," he said. "And now I get to share with people what I know and the research I've done about it in a scholarly setting."

Mick, who has a B.A. and an M.A. in history from Sonoma State University, taught American history at the high school level for 36 years in Sonoma. Then, following retirement in 2011, he began teaching courses on early American and Civil War history for Osher Lifelong Learning programs at Sonoma State, Dominican College, and UC Davis. When Dominican College suggested he teach a course on baseball, he readily accepted the challenge of creating a serious, "thought-provoking" course on America's National Pastime.

Mick's approach is to "deconstruct" the sport into six main components, four of which will be covered in his UC Berkeley OLLI class. These are: the fans ("Forty-two percent of ticket-buyers are now women"), the players, the managers and general managers, and the media. The sequel course he gives at Dominican and Sonoma State continues the breakdown of the four elements and covers ballparks and owners as well as other subjects related to the game.

As a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, Mick has become very interested not only in the history of baseball but also in its analytics-the way mathematicians, economists, and computer scientists establish quantifiable data on all aspects of the game. He explained how companies can now break down videos of games from every angle and give teams vast quantities of information that can be used to play the next game more effectively. And because of the increased data flow, managers now tend to make more and more changes during the game: relieving pitchers, changing a right-hander for a left-hander, and so forth. "It's incredible how much data is collected now. It's no longer a simple game. It's a brave new world out there."

To illustrate his point, Mick described how pitchers on the Oakland A's are each given an iPad, and before every game, they can be seen plugging in to learn the tendencies of each batter, for example, whether he'll swing at the first pitch or if he takes high fast balls or outside curves.

CERAS Learning Hall (CERAS 101), 520 Galvez Mall, Lobby Level, Stanford University 

The life course is changing. The extension of adolescence, lengthening lifespans, and the ever-growing demands of paid work and parenting are obliging Americans to rethink every phase of adulthood. At the same time, digital media are making it possible to radically reorganize how learning fits into the rhythms of adult lives. This forum assembles innovative thinkers in a wide range of fields to help us imagine bold recombinations of learning and the life course. More info at http://edf.stanford.edu/events/learning-and-life-course 

OLLI director Susan Hoffman and OLLI member Jake Warner will attend the 2014 OLLI National Conference, April 28-30, in Carlsbad, California. Susan will present on the work that OLLI @Berkeley has done on the issue of hearing accessibility.