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Inside Pitch

By Dr. John D. Eigenauer
October 20, 2006

George Gmelch’s Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball was originally published in 2001, but went out of print. The University of Nebraska picked the title up and republished it with an additional chapter. It was a fine choice: the book deserves to be in print because of the unusual perspective that it brings baseball fans.

That perspective comes from Gmelch having played minor league baseball for the Tigers in the 1960s and later becoming a professional anthropologist. As an anthropologist, he knows how to gather and assimilate data about people, see how their lives and habits fit into those of the group, track individuals against a social and cultural background, and draw appropriate conclusions. He is also a very good academic writer.

Gmelch worked for five years interviewing players at all levels of baseball, learning about the life of the ballplayer. His research is compelling because he assumed that he did not know about that life, even though he had lived it. It turns out he was right. While his playing experience helped him connect to players, managers, and coaches, and helped him to know his way around baseball and understand the jargon, the game had changed greatly in the 25 years that he was away from it. That makes the book not only an insightful piece of anthropology, but a fetching personal memoir.

Gmelch traces a baseball player’s life from being scouted in high school, through the draft, on the long trip through the minor leagues, to the majors, and through retirement. He does not consider any one player’s path to be typical, but finds what those many paths have in common and writes eloquently and insightfully about them. Throughout, Gmelch brings more than personal observation to bear on his insights, often citing academic studies to support his claims. In noting that young pitchers often press when scouts are in the stands, for example, he cites research that shows that the effects are quantifiable: young pitchers lose about 3.5 MPH off their fastballs when they know that the radar gun is on them.

Other observations are more anecdotal, but no less insightful. He writes about players earning nicknames as they gain acceptance, obsession with statistics, learning to compete for the first time against other great players (one player remarked that he had been accustomed to being the dominant player, and now was playing alongside guys who were All-Americans in other sports as well!), the elation at being promoted, the single-mindedness required to succeed, and the shock at being released. I sensed that when Gmelch portrayed a player’s reaction, he did so because he had seen that reaction so many times that he considered it typical.

These observations paint a picture of players being completely absorbed in the experience of baseball as profession. One might be tempted to compare a player’s struggle to reach the majors to law or medical school because of the talent and focus needed to succeed at each. But Gmelch makes the reader realize that the factors that add up to success are so numerous and uncontrollable that a baseball player’s life is unlike anything else. I truly enjoyed Gmelch’s surprise at his realization of how singular his own experience had been as he returned to the game as an anthropologist.

This last aspect of the book—rediscovery—is fascinating because anthropologists don’t usually return to discover their own past by studying contemporary subjects. Above all, that is what makes the book worth reading: that it is more than an anthropological look at life inside baseball; it is a personal memoir whose intimacy adds value and insight to the study. Some observations are common knowledge, and some of the material is already dated, but the book is a really fun read, it is quite well written, and it is refreshingly different from most baseball books in tone and topic.

John Eigenauer can be contacted at jeigenauer@yahoo.com. A complete list of his reviews and more about him can be found here.