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Playing with Tigers: A Minor League Chronicle of the Sixties, by George Gmelch
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In 1965 George Gmelch signed a contract to play professional baseball with the Detroit Tigers organization. Growing up sheltered in an all-white, affluent San Francisco suburb, he knew little of the world outside. Over the next four seasons, he came of age in baseball’s Minor Leagues through experiences ranging from learning the craft of the professional game to becoming conscious of race and class for the first time.
Playing with Tigers is not a typical baseball memoir. Now a well-known anthropologist, Gmelch recounts a baseball education unlike any other as he got to know small-town life across the United States against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil rights protests, and the emergence of the counterculture. The social and political turmoil of the times spilled into baseball, and Gmelch experienced the consequences firsthand as he played out his career in the Jim Crow South. Playing with Tigers captures the gritty, insular, and humorous life and culture of Minor League baseball during a period when both the author and the country were undergoing profound changes.
Drawing from journals he kept as a player, letters, and recent interviews with thirty former teammates, coaches, club officials, and even former girlfriends, Gmelch immerses the reader in the life of the Minor Leagues, capturing—in a manner his unique position makes possible—the universal struggle of young athletes trying to make their way.
- Sales Rank: #841799 in Books
- Published on: 2016-02-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.16" h x 1.04" w x 6.43" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Review
"You don't need to have any particular team affiliation to enjoy this book. It really is a good book about a life journey that has a baseball flair to it."—Gregg Kersey, Gregg's Baseball Bookcase (Gregg Kersey Gregg's Baseball Bookcase 2016-02-28)
“A completely engaging, insightful tour of a lost era of the 1960s in baseball and America. . . . A ballplayer-turned-anthropologist, Gmelch skillfully applies his ethnographic skills to his own experience. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to want to read this fascinating, very personal, and often surprising story. Enthusiastically recommended.”—Robert Elias, author of The Empire Strikes Out (Robert Elias 2015-04-22)
“George Gmelch is an astute guide to the magic and mystery of the Minor Leagues in the 1960s, and Playing with Tigers belongs alongside baseball memoirs by Brosnan, Bouton, Jordan, and Hayhurst. Anyone who cares about the people who play the game should read this insightful and intelligent book.”—Trey Strecker, editor of NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture (Trey Strecker 2015-03-04)
“A compelling glimpse into a vanished social world, the trials and tribulations of an aspiring Minor League Tiger, as well as the glimmerings of an insightful, productive social scientist who still loves and has a feel for the game.”—Daniel A. Nathan, president of the North American Society for Sport History and author of Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal (Daniel A. Nathan 2015-03-04)
“A remarkable baseball story from an extraordinary anthropologist and writer.”—Dan Gordon, author of Haunted Baseball (Dan Gordon 2015-03-04)
“George Gmelch has written a true and compelling story of Minor League Baseball in the ’60s. . . . It’s an engaging and accurate portrait of the lives and work of Minor League hopefuls chasing the dream of making it to the Majors.”—Jim Leyland, former Major League manager of the Detroit Tigers, Florida Marlins, and Pittsburgh Pirates
(Jim Leyland 2015-04-22)
About the Author
George Gmelch is a professor of anthropology at the University of San Francisco and at Union College in Schenectady, New York. He is the author of a dozen books, including In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People, with J. J. Weiner (Bison Books, 2006), and Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball (Bison Books, 2006) and is the editor of Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime (Nebraska, 2006). His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Psychology Today, Society, and Natural History.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
The Bat and the Book
By Howard J. De Nike
A professional memoir by one of America’s foremost anthropologists – but with a difference. The genre is filled with examples (see, for instance Geertz’s “After the Fact” [1995] or Mead’s “Blackberry Winter” [1995]). George Gmelch, however, offers recollections of his days as a professional baseball player!
Well before hearing the siren lure of ethnography in such exotic locales as Barbados, Alaska, and Tasmania, Gmelch wanted nothing more than to make it to “the Bigs” – as many a young man has dreamed before and since.
Gmelch first caught the eye of a Detroit Tigers scout (about the same time he received an acceptance to Stanford University), and signed a minor league contract with the ball club in 1965. Baseball’s priority over the next several years is beyond question, as the author vividly recounts his promotions and demotions.
Gmelch had the numbers – batting average and power – to justify optimism. But his journal entries during off-seasons at Stanford reveal a widening set of interests – Vietnam War protests and Civil Rights.
In Rocky Mount, North Carolina he became known among teammates for haunting the local library. The cool air and Bernard Shaw’s plays drew him in, but he also noted its “whites only” patronage. The Civil Rights Act may have been passed a few years before, yet Rocky Mount was doing its best to ignore the law. Jim Crow still reigned.
Readers will know the book’s outcome – that the author’s future was to lie in anthropology – so the degree of suspense is illusive. Genuine drama, however, is found in Gmelch’s description of his final days in the Tiger organization. At the time he was sending columns to his local newspaper reporting on Southern race relations, an exotic subject for middle-class California suburbia. What chance would there be that when he mentioned “the town’s police chief (is) a member of the Ku Klux Klan,” it would ever reach the attention of anybody back in Rocky Mount? But it did.
Thus followed an unraveling of baseball as the centerpiece of life until then. As Gmelch candidly puts it: “Baseball … was who I was.” Despite a hot bat, the Tigers shortly released him.
George Gmelch is fortunate: Few rookies survive the rigors encountered on the pathway to the Big Leagues, and in his soberest moments he must realize he had no guarantees on this score. He will always, nonetheless, be able to content himself with the knowledge that while his baseball career died, it did so for a higher cause, pursuit of “understanding people and culture.”
For lovers of a good baseball yarn and students of anthropology alike, "Playing With Tigers" offers solid insights and poignant reflections on every page.
Howard J. De Nike, J.D., Ph.D., Lecturer, University of San Francisco Anthropology Program
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
discover what it was like to have been a minor leaguer
By DB361
I am 3 years younger than the author and grew up a Tigers fan in Toledo, Ohio. I always heard about these minor league teams but knew the managers only by their photos in the Tiger yearbook. What a treat to get to know them, discover what it was like to have been a minor leaguer. The author does a good job of describing the ups and downs of baseball while also telling us about his own difficult process of growing up in the 60's, eligible for the draft, and so on. I'm so glad this otherwise academic person took the time to share his younger days with us.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Read this book!
By Josh Ostergaard
Playing with Tigers: A Minor League Chronicle of the Sixties by George Gmelch is an enjoyable read and a thoughtful look back at “A” level professional baseball as it was played fifty years ago. It was recently published by the University of Nebraska Press, where it joins an excellent list of baseball titles.
In Playing with Tigers, Gmelch tells the story of his own career as a baseball player, from the first glimmers of an obsession that grew, in part, from being lucky enough to attend game four of the 1956 World Series in New York City as a twelve year-old, to his intense focus on perfecting his batting as a high school student, and all the way through playing in the Tigers organization and the Québec Provincial League in the mid-to-late sixties.
Gmelch, whose nickname as a player was “Moonbeam,” was the only one on his various teams to spend the mornings before games reading in the public libraries of the minor league towns he visited. Though he makes light of his reading choices from those days, which included Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, the underlying truth is what makes this book a pleasure to read: Moonbeam Gmelch was different from the other players. His journals, rich with detail about minor league life, form the narrative core of the book. Alongside the highs and lows of his own performance at the plate, we glimpse the many ways Gmelch passed the time between games: from his habit of climbing light poles to get a better look at the countryside when nobody else was in the ballpark, to ignoring a tornado warning and sliding with teammates in storm-drenched grass, to his prank of posting a fake notice of promotions and cuts at the Tigers spring training camp in 1966.
I’ve read several baseball memoirs, but I’ve never read one with such disarming personal insight into both the day-to-day aspects of trying to make it in the professional sport and the ways that a player’s worldview can influence performance. With humor and even a little wistfulness, Gmelch tells the story of his own transition from being a baseball-obsessed player who cared mainly about fitting into the pants of Tiger great Al Kaline (literally and metaphorically) to a citizen whose attention was increasingly occupied by the Vietnam War and the wider range of social problems the war made visible. After being promoted to the Tiger affiliate in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Gmelch saw that Jim Crow conditions persisted despite the recent passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His rising social consciousness and his once-simple dream of playing baseball for a living came into conflict, and the world is better for it. A few years after being cut from the Tigers—an interesting story that connects to his increasing political awareness that I’ll save for the reader—Gmelch completed a PhD and began his long and varied career as an anthropologist. This book is a compelling, pleasurable, and thought-provoking read, whether you are a fan of the Tigers, of baseball history more broadly, or are simply interested in learning how the major social conflicts and transitions of the sixties affected the life of one young man.
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