It's my first road trip in 24 years. As the Birmingham Barons bus pulls out of the stadium parking lot -- destination Jacksonville, then to Orlando, for eight road games -- manager Tony Franklin stands up to introduce me. "I'd like you to meet George Gmelch. He's an anthropologist studying your lives as ballplayers. I don't know why anyone would find what you do interesting, but that's his business, and he's a whole lot smarter than me."
There's some laughter, and then Franklin continues. "Anyway, he was a player in the Tigers organization in the 60's, so he knows his way around. I want you to help him any way you can ..." The players turn in their seats, craning to get a good look at me. I smile a lot, trying not to show my nervousness. I appreciate Tony's remarks, but I no longer know my way around, and I wonder if these guys will accept a graying professor in their midst.
Why would an anthropologist want to study baseball? That's the first question I usually get since finishing Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball, the result of five years of riding buses and hanging out with ballplayers. The short answer is that sport is a product of culture, and anthropologists are interested in all aspects of culture. The sports we play, how we play them, and the attention we give them tell us something about who we -- Americans -- are as a people.
Baseball has special meaning for me because it was once my boyhood ambition, and for five years it was my career. I left baseball in 1969 after being released from the Detroit Tigers' farm team. Without a baseball career, I went on to graduate school after finishing my B.A. degree in anthropology. In graduate school, I turned away from the game -- scarcely noticing baseball, not even watching the World Series. Following baseball was too painful a reminder of how I had messed up my sports career (more on that later) and failed to reach the big leagues. Once I became an anthropologist, I was usually abroad doing field research during the baseball season. It took 25 years before I was ready to go back to the sport.
As the popularity of baseball boomed in the 1980's and academic interest in sports grew, my wife, also an anthropologist, urged me to look at the culture of baseball. At the same time, my son began playing Little League ball. Sharing this rite of passage with him rekindled my interest. My fate was sealed when I walked past a televised game just as the camera zoomed in on a familiar face -- Jim Leyland, the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The man who was twice my teammate in the minor leagues was still in baseball. Another former teammate, Gene Lamont, was in the coaching box at third base. I sat down and watched the entire game. Before long I was planning my return -- this time, as a scholar.
But what approach should I take? As an anthropologist devoted to the study of "the other," I knew comparatively little about historical trends in my own society. This became apparent to me during a symposium on baseball and American culture, held annually at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. After listening to historians and other baseball scholars discuss the game and its broader relationship to American society, I concluded I was out of my league.
Then, during the discussion of a paper on professional baseball in Canada, the author mentioned to the audience that I had once played in Quebec and might have something to say. Cast in the role of insider, I realized that my background as a player was an advantage.
I decided to pursue an ethnography of professional baseball in the same fashion as I had previously studied Irish Travellers, English Gypsies, Alaskan fishermen, and Barbadian villagers. I would render explicit the insider's understanding and experience of the sport -- why ballplayers are so superstitious, why pranks and practical joking are such a big part of team life, why players have such a difficult time adjusting to life after baseball.
I retrieved the journals I had written during my playing days, hoping they might offer insight into what baseball culture had been like. Instead, I discovered how faulty memory can be. I was stunned to read an entry from July 1967, which declared, "If I play minor league baseball long enough, I would like to write a book about the rigors of the life." I had no recollection of ever wanting to write a book about baseball. And, I wondered, why did I only mention the minor leagues? Did I already suspect back then that I wasn't going to play in the big leagues?
Like most anthropologists, I was trained to do field work by taking up residence with the people I wished to study and immersing myself in their lives. The closest I could come to this in baseball would be to accompany teams on road trips. Having once been part of the baseball fraternity and still knowing people in the game eventually made that possible. But when I first proposed traveling with the Birmingham Barons, a team owned by a college friend, no one in the parent Chicago White Sox organization would give me permission to do so. They were concerned about what I might write. (My own baseball career had ended after a newspaper article I had written about racism in the Southern town I was playing for resulted in threats of a lawsuit. Though the suit was never filed, not long after, Detroit released me.) My request to join the Barons on a road trip passed up and down the chain until it reached the desk of White Sox President Jerry Reinsdorf. He took a chance, and I began traveling with the Barons.
On my first trip, to Jacksonville, we only get a mile from the ballpark when the team bus stops at a Blockbuster. Half-a-dozen players pile off and return with an armful of videos. That night, during the 13-hour ride, the players watch Diehard, Lethal Weapon, Road Warrior, Robo Cop 2, and The Abyss. Around 4 a.m., I wad bits of paper napkin and stuff them in my ears. Players who aren't watching the movie listen to music on their Walkmans.
In the 60's, team buses were often old and cramped. Players passed the time playing cards and trivia games, looking out the window, and talking. Someone usually had a guitar, and a few would join in singing. On the Barons's bus, the banter and fellowship I so fondly remembered from my day are missing. In exchange, as on the other team buses I was later to ride, is comfort: leg room, bigger seats, large clean windows, a toilet in the rear, reliable air-conditioning, and TV's and VCR's. When one player's Walkman breaks, he tells me he doesn't know how he's going to survive the trip. When I mention this later to Tony Franklin, the manager, who like me had grown up in the pre-personal-electronics era, he says, "Those damn things have ruined road trips. They've taken all the fun out of them."
I was concerned that having once been part of the baseball culture I would not be able to see it clearly. Anthropologists believe that difference often makes it easier for them to see or grasp the culture of the groups they study. When studying your own group, what you observe can seem like so much common sense. You anguish over the obviousness of everything people are saying. Fortunately, my time away from the game had given me perspective. In fact, there was much that was different.
For one, baseball had become multicultural. There are now Asians and Australians, and many more Latinos; Martinez, Rodriguez, and Hernandez are the most common surnames. In the 1960's, baseball was still predominantly a white game, even though it had been two decades since Jackie Robinson. The new multicultural major leagues (the recent All-Star game had players from seven countries) are drawing new attention to baseball worldwide, while the global awareness of American fans grows as they become more familiar with the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Japan, Korea, and the other nations from which today's big leaguers come.
At the outset, I remembered my playing days, when few players had been to college and there was a wariness about things intellectual. When I met Eddie Creech, manager of the Jamestown Expos, at the start of my second road trip and used the term "occupational subculture" while explaining my research, he said, "Whoa, slow down with them big words. You're talking to an uneducated Southern boy." Creech turned out to be bright, articulate, and helpful. But his response made me wonder how players would react to my queries and presence.
My concerns proved baseless. Ballplayers, with few exceptions, were good subjects, and very agreeable to being interviewed. Professional baseball needs the media to cover it, and therefore baseball management expects its players to cooperate with writers. Players didn't always have a lot to say -- some spoke in clichés and, unless prodded, answered questions without fresh thought. In their defense, one manager told me, "It is their reaction to being asked so many incredibly stupid questions by people who just don't have a clue." Since I wasn't asking the usual questions about team performance and player personalities, after a while I was able to get most players to answer thoughtfully.
My work day began four hours before game time when the first players and coaches trickled in. During "pre-game," I had access to the field, dugout, and club house. During the game, I watched from the press box or sometimes interviewed baseball wives near the family lounge. It wasn't the kind of round-the-clock participant observation I was accustomed to in my earlier field work, but it would do.
A lot of anthropological research is serendipitous. Such was my decision to include baseball wives and groupies. When I was interviewing Bernie Williams, center fielder for the New York Yankees, he kept saying, "Oh, you should really talk to my wife, she would know better than me." The next day I interviewed Waleska Williams, who introduced me to other Yankee wives. They told me about the strains of baseball life on family and home that players never talked about.
I discovered that while few baseball wives have college degrees, careers, or strong feminist sympathies going into their marriages, they are resourceful and independent women. The baseball life, in which husbands are absent much of the year -- on road trips and spring training, and sometimes playing winter ball -- forces them to assume all of the responsibilities of running a household. They raise the kids, maintain the home, and when the husband is traded, promoted, or demoted to a new team, they U-haul the family to the new town, find a place to live, and enroll the kids in school.
Speaking to baseball wives led me to an interest in groupies, who became a separate chapter in the book. Groupies, known as baseball Annies in my day, are a big part of the baseball landscape. And it isn't just about sex or, for the women, rubbing shoulders with celebrity. Many of the groupies in the low minors help players with chores, run errands, chauffeur them around town, and most importantly, become valued companions to young athletes away from home.
One of the pleasures of the research was being in ballparks. Ballparks are magical places: emerald-green fields, the sweep of the grandstands and the rainbow formed by multicolored seating sections, the silhouette of the light towers against the night sky. Phillip J. Lowry titled his book on ballparks Green Cathedrals, because the more he studied ballparks, the more he thought they resembled places of worship.
Ballparks are also exciting for their activity -- batting practice, fielders taking in grounders, outfielders hitting fungoes, fans pleading for autographs, players being interviewed by the media, others sprawled on the grass stretching or playing pepper, groundskeepers watering the deep brown infield dirt or renewing the foul lines with fresh chalk. For me, as a former ballplayer, no research setting will ever match the ballpark.
A bonus of the research was that it took me back to many of the places I had played a generation before, to towns in Minnesota, North Carolina, New York, and to Tigertown in Lakeland, Florida, and to vivid memories: the smells of grass, pine tar, and rosin, the sound of metal spikes clacking on the cement runway. At night I dreamed that I was playing baseball and hitting better than ever. I was a star. Reconnecting with former teammates and old girlfriends whom I hadn't seen in 25 years, I rediscovered the person I was in my youth. Our recollections of each another, though a generation old, were unclouded by new, shared experiences.
A chance encounter during spring training with Gail Henley, twice a manager of mine in the minor leagues, had a powerful impact even after three decades and a fulfilling career as a professor. Henley and I were chatting about the old times when my curiosity got the better of me, and I blurted out the question that had nagged at me for many years: Had I been a real prospect? I'd always wondered if I could have made it to the big leagues. Although I had usually batted clean-up and was twice promoted in midseason, my batting average fluctuated wildly from one season to the next. And I had been released from baseball prematurely, my career ended by that threatened libel suit.
Henley hesitated before answering. "No," he said softly, "you were good, but never a real prospect. You weren't the complete package. You were lucky to get out of baseball when you did and go on to graduate school."
I felt a pang, disbelief, some defensiveness, but also an odd sense of relief. Henley's assessment put an end to my springtime fantasies about the life I might have lived.
George Gmelch is a professor of anthropology at Union College (N.Y.) and the author of Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001) and, with Sharon Bohn Gmelch, of The Parish Behind God's Back: The Changing Culture of Rural Barbados (University of Michigan Press, 1997), as well as other books.
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