A new book by George Gmelch, professor of anthropology, and J.J. Weiner
'94 focuses not on the players whose names appear in the sports pages but on those
who make the game possible – often from behind the scenes.
In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People
(Smithsonian Institution Press) consists of interviews with a range of people connected
with major and minor league operations: the beer-seller at Camden Yards who is a bond
trader by day, the guy who works as the Philly's Phanatic mascot, groundskeepers,
front-office execs, ballplayers and field managers.
The idea for the book came in 1991 when Gmelch was traveling with the
Birmingham Barons for an ethnographic study of baseball players. After talking with a
number of non-players, “it didn't take long to discover that the lives of these
'other' baseball people was interesting in its own right, though much less
understood,” Gmelch writes in the preface. In 1992, Weiner – who now teaches
fifth grade at a school in New Jersey — began a series of interviews with baseball
people in the Southern League. The following year, the pair began to collaborate; the book
is based on interviews they conducted between 1993 and 1996.
“Conducting the interviews for this book has fundamentally altered
our own perspective on baseball,” they write. “Now, when at the ballpark, we
find ourselves paying as much attention to the workers off the playing field and their
routines as to the game itself.”
Here is an excerpt from Jerry Collier, a beer vendor at Baltimore's
Camden Yards:
“Most people think a guy that's a beer vendor is the scum of
the earth. I have a master's degree in finance. There's a vendor who has a
master's degree in biology; there are three engineers; we have medical students,
dental students, and Johns Hopkins students and graduates working here. They got the job
when they were in school. They got out of school and said, 'Why should I give up
making $15,000 a season?'”