Major League Baseball remains the national pastime, and Doris Kearns Goodwin is a national treasure, or so believes MLB Commissioner Bud Selig.

Dr. Kearns Goodwin travels the United States, lecturing on historic giants — Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt — and on the magic of baseball. She often likens the two unique American subjects.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian from Brooklyn grew up cheering for the Dodgers until the team’s “fateful move to Los Angeles.” She especially admired Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese and Duke Snider, and learned at age 6 to keep score so she could record the history of the event for her father, who insisted on revisiting the afternoon games at Ebbets Field with her.

Crestfallen following the departure of the Dodgers for Los Angeles, years later she became a die-hard fan of the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park while studying for a Ph.D. at Harvard University. The noted historian has had season tickets for 30 consecutive years and accumulated a trove of cherished memories. And though her father passed away in her 20s, Doris has handed down his love of the game to her three sons.

“Few understand baseball and politics like Doris does,” said Selig, who often invites her and columnist George Will to share his World Series box. “Nothing escapes her.”

She recently told a New York audience that she has spent “most of my professional life living with dead presidents.” Her latest foray into the past, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” centers on political clashes between Lincoln and the officers of his Cabinet. The book will soon be made into a Hollywood film directed by Academy Award winner Steven Spielberg and starring fellow Oscar winners Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field.

Kearns Goodwin recently received the prestigious Ted Kennedy Award for Writing, bestowed by the College Board and its president, Gaston Caperton. “She is so alive with ideas,” Caperton said after presenting the national award.

Kearns Goodwin especially enjoys “the drama of the on field activities.” She regards herself as a story teller.

“The love of history has allowed me to spend a lifetime looking back at the past and remembering that people we have lost in our families and the public figures we have respected can live on, so long as we pledge to tell and retell the stories of their lives,” she likes to remind her audiences.

She is now working on a new book that will be about Theodore Roosevelt, focusing on his relationship with William Howard Taft, the election of 1912 and the treacherous journalism of the Progressive era.

In 1975, Kearns married Richard Goodwin, playwright and presidential adviser, speechwriter to both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Despite her many commitments across America, she always finds time to return to the inner peace found at historic Fenway Park. Few things are of more importance to her than rekindling cherished memories.