Thomas Altherr is a 30-year veteran professor of history at Metro State and a nationally renowned baseball historian.

As a kid, Thomas Altherr loved playing baseball in the local sandlot. Following in the cleat steps of his grandfather, who had been a catcher for the minor-league Cleveland Indians, Altherr played catcher for his college team at the State University of New York at Fredonia in the 1960s. Throughout his lengthy and distinguished academic career, Altherr’s love of the sport never waned. Today, the 30-year veteran professor of history at Metro State is a nationally renowned baseball historian. But his rise in the field of baseball history was almost accidental.

Altherr arrived at Metro State in 1979 with a freshly minted doctorate in history from the Ohio State University. “The regular professor of sports history went on sabbatical and I volunteered to fill in,” he recalls. “But there was a lot about a lot of different sports that I didn’t know, so I had to teach myself.”

Altherr had been teaching Sports in America, among other history courses, for ten years when, in 1989, he learned that the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame was holding a baseball history conference for its 50^th anniversary. “I submitted a paper on a whim, and they accepted it,” he says. That same year, he discovered that there were 50 different academic courses across the country on different aspects of baseball, including its history and literature.

Already “in the habit of setting up new courses,” Altherr asked his dean and then-department chair Steve Leonard if he could develop an upper-level course at Metro specifically on the history of baseball. They agreed, provided he could get enough students to enroll. That proved not to be an issue: Altherr taught the first section of American Baseball History at Metro State in spring of 1991 to a full classroom, and has continued to teach it -- fully enrolled--every year since.

Altherr says he’s been fortunate to bring in some unique historical voices, such as a former player from the Negro Leagues and one from the Women’s League, thanks to the remarkable resources at the College and in the city. And, with the formation of the Colorado Rockies in 1993 (and their trip to the playoffs later this week), the popularity of baseball history doesn’t seem to be at risk of fading.

The high enrollment comes as no surprise to the many students who have taken classes with Altherr, who consistently give him high ratings in student evaluations. He has received the Golden Key Excellence in Teaching award, the Golden Key Outstanding Faculty Researcher Award and, just this fall, the Distinguished Service Award.

Over the course of his career with the College, Altherr has offered 29 different courses, and has personally developed nine new courses. He says his innovative streak comes from “not wanting to get stale.” And he’s learned a lot along the way. Some of the courses he developed were less popular: American Agricultural History, for instance, was cancelled after one semester due to low enrollment. By contrast, American Humor History had very high enrollment, but was difficult to teach due to a lack of available scholarly materials on the subject.

Altherr has also been a prolific writer, publishing numerous award-winning popular and scholarly publications, including at the Cooperstown baseball conference, where he’s presented a paper every year since 1989. His 2000 article on baseball in the colonial, Revolutionary, and Early Republic periods published in the major baseball history journal “NINE” was chosen from a total of over 600 articles for the 2001 Society of Baseball Research/McFarland Award and is widely considered a groundbreaking work in the field. In recognition of his research on the pre-1840 period of baseball, Altherr was recently cited as one of the four greatest baseball historians of all time, in a “Mount Rushmore of Baseball,” for a soon-to-be-published book by author John Shiffert.

Altherr has channeled some of his seemingly boundless energy in committee and union work, having served 15 years on the Faculty Senate and on numerous committees for the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, most notably the Retention, Promotion and Tenure Committee for many years. And, he shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. In fact, in recent years he’s played catcher in a senior baseball league.