Back in 1991, George Gmelch, chairman
of the Anthropology Department and a former minor league
first baseman, spent time traveling with the Birmingham
Barons while beginning an ethnographic study of baseball
players.
The following year, one of his
students, J.J. Weiner '94, worked as an intern
with the same team.
In 1993, the two decided to collaborate, and both went back on the road during the
next three years to visit ballparks and talk with the
people who create the spirit of baseball.
This year, the result of their labors
was published — In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of
Baseball People (Smithsonian Institution Press). Gmelch
and Weiner interviewed a range of people connected with
major and minor league baseball operations — the
beerseller at Camden Yards who is a bond trader by day,
the guy who works as the Philly's Phanatic mascot,
groundskeepers, front-office executives, ballplayers, and
field managers. The result is an insider's look at the
life and work of professional baseball.
In the preface to the book, the authors
note that “baseball people share a feeling of being
part of a select group.”
For the players and managers — widely
known and highly paid — the reasons for their
satisfaction seem obvious. But the reasons are just as
strong, if more subtle, for the others — the people who
broadcast baseball, write about it, scout young talent,
or keep the ballparks running.
“Baseball … is often their
passion — the focus of their lives,” the authors
say. “Some actually feel 'blessed' to be in
baseball; for many, it is the fulfillment of childhood
ambition.”
With the baseball season in full swing,
it seems the perfect time to enjoy some excerpts from
this potpourri of baseball voices.
Jerry Collier, beer
vendor, Camden Yards, Baltimore
During the day, Jerry Collier works as
a bond trader at a major bank in downtown Baltimore; on
weeknights and on weekends, when the Orioles are in town,
he is a beer vendor at Camden Yards. He is also an
adjunct professor of finance and accounting at a local
college.
You work on straight commission. It's fifteen percent up to a certain amount — for Budweiser
beer it's fifteen cases. Once you sell fifteen cases,
every sale that you make for that whole game skips up to
seventeen percent. Seventy-eight dollars a case times
seventeen percent is $13.26. Multiply that by fifteen
cases and you're making at least $200 a game….
I get to the stadium at 6:15, dead tired because I just worked nine hours at the bank….
[But] once the sales start to pick up, you get into a
zone. You get an adrenaline rush and you can't turn it
off. I could go home and take three tranquilizers and I
would be up until two o'clock in the morning just from
running around and being with people. You're working
fast, plus you're working smart. It's like trading
securities all day where big sums of money are flying by
and there's no time for mistakes….
One of the things that makes me different from everybody else is trivia. At the beginning
of the game, I go down to the front of the field, in
front of the thousands of people in my sections and say,
“Here's a trivia question — the first one to get it
right gets three free beers.” Immediately they're
keyed into my face and my voice….
To be honest, I get more of a kick out of selling beer than watching the game. I'm a big Orioles
fan and I watch them all the time when they're out of
town, but when you're there, you go from being a watcher
of the game to being a part of the game. For most people,
going to a ball game is more that just watching eighteen
guys run around on the field. It's the whole aura of
being in a baseball stadium, of having a beer vendor and
somebody flipping peanuts at you, and ushers that have
been there forever, and all that. It's a scene. It's the
people at the stadium who make a good time happen.
QV Lowe, manager, Jamestown (N.Y.) Expos
QV Lowe has spent all but one of his twenty-six years in professional baseball in the minor
leagues.
Here [in the New York-Penn League] I am
managing kids who are entering their first season of pro
ball. I like to form my own opinions about them. I don't
want to know what round they were drafted in. I don't
want the farm director telling me how much money the kid
got. Most of the time, I don't even want to see the
scout's report. I don't want anyone coloring my opinion
of a kid before I get a chance to look at him carefully
myself…
Our main purpose is for them to get
better and to go out and do the best they can, so we can
see where they stand and what their chances are of
playing in the big leagues. That's our primary purpose
for being here, and that's hard for some of them to
understand, coming from college or high school ball where
winning was everything….
Most of the kids come from college, where they've been kept busy with their classes,
homework, and practice in the afternoons. Here they've
got a lot of free time and that can be a problem. Many of
them don't know what to do with that free time, and a lot
make the wrong decisions. They spend it chasing women and
hanging out in bars. They think chasing women and booze
is the way it is in pro ball. They don't want to do it,
but they get drawn into it, and the next thing they know
they're hooked. Some of them never get out. I tell them
that there are more good ballplayers taken down by their
nightlife or their drinking than by anything else….
The single most difficult task in all
of pro ball is having to release a player. I'd rather
take a beating than have to release someone. It is
devastating to you and to the player. All kids are
crushed; they feel like their life is over. I have
worried that every kid I've ever released would run out
of the office and commit suicide….I tell the kid that
there is no need for him to hang around in this game not
making much money and not having a chance to be
successful and that the best thing is to go out and get a
job and get on with his life….
Most released players try to catch on with another team, but it's awfully difficult…. Some of
them will go a year trying to hook on with another
organization, and some do. But ninety percent don't go
far; usually the decision was right in the first place.
Scott Jaster,
ballplayer, Birmingham Barons
From early childhood, Scott Jaster wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and become a
major league ballplayer. He played at all levels of the
minor leagues for three different organizations and
today, at age twenty-nine, his dream is beginning to
fade.
In Memphis I got off to a good start and was hitting close to .300 when I hurt my wrist
sliding. I didn't feel much pain at first and kept
playing. Then I could feel it and started struggling at
the plate. Your bat control and your mechanics change all
on their own when your brain is trying to protect an
injured part of your body….Finally, they sat me down
for the whole month of July to see if my wrist would come
around. It didn't, and I ended up seeing three doctors
over the next couple of months. Finally one of them
scoped it and found tears in the cartilage. The doctor —
not the specialist I wanted to go to — made some repairs
and cleaned it up a bit. He made me think it was going to
be all right and that I'd make a full recovery. I was in
rehab for it all winter and went to Florida to work out
with my dad for two months before the start of spring
training. I got back to where I could do everything that
I had done before, but my wrist felt different. Knowing
that I had to put the surgery behind me and be positive,
I made myself believe that I was 100 percent.
During the first game of spring training, I hurt my wrist again. I didn't realize it
until that night. I had all the same symptoms — locking
and heat flashes — and the wrist swelled up. I was
afraid to say anything. I showed it to the trainer and
told him I didn't want anyone else to know because this
spring was do or die for me. So I played on my sore
wrist, and over the next nine games I got only one hit.
On the tenth day they called me up to the office and told
me they were releasing me. I told them my wrist was
bothering me, and they kind of looked at me like I was
making excuses, like they didn't believe me….I packed
up and left the next morning for the long drive back to
Midland, Michigan.
Paul Zwaska, head groundskeeper, Baltimore Orioles
Paul Zwaska oversees a crew of seven
full-time workers and seventeen part-timers.
Meteorological instruments, a computer, and a couple
dozen switches and dials in his office suggest that
caring for grass and dirt is a scientific enterprise —
at least at Camden Yards.
To be a groundskeeper you've got to be a weatherman, a janitor, and a mechanic….There are a
lot of jobs to do that people don't even realize, such as
washing the dugouts, washing the outfield track,
vacuuming the track, cleaning the bases, painting the
outfield foul lines with latex paint, cleaning the
bullpens, repairing the batter's boxes and the pitcher's
mound, and repairing and vacuuming the batting and
pitching tunnels in the clubhouse — all of which have to
be done every game day.
But most of our time is spent maintaining and repairing the grass and dirt. No aspect
of a ballpark or the playing conditions changes the game
of baseball as much as the surface. Tall grass will slow
down the ball. The type of dirt and its firmness
influences the speed of ground balls and their chances of
getting through the field for hits. But the grass is
always on my mind….
Whenever I go upstairs to the front office, where you can look out the windows, I always stop
and look down at the field to see what it looks like from
above. I like baseball, but even more I like how a
baseball field looks — especially when it's in its
prime. And when I watch a game on TV, I'm always looking
at the other guy's field. I think all groundskeepers do
the same thing.
Durwood Merrill, umpire, American League
Of the several hundred individuals who enroll in one of America's three umpire-development
schools, only a handful are chosen to begin umpiring at
the lowest levels of the minor leagues. The odds of their
eventually making it to the big leagues is no better than
that of first-year ballplayers, about five percent.
Those five weeks in umpire school were probably the hardest five weeks of my life. It was like
boot camp — everything that I did was wrong. I walked
wrong, I talked wrong, I called outs wrong, I called
safes wrong, I called strikes wrong. They break you down
and remake you into their own mold. But right from the
start, I discovered that the one thing I did have was
good judgment. You can teach an umpire a lot of things —
where to be positioned on all the plays, how to call
balls and strikes, the rule book — but you can't teach
him judgment….
We try to get to the ballpark several hours before the game. The plate man, the umpire who will
call the balls and strikes, is especially in his own
world…. We sit around and talk — maybe about last
night's ball game — or we watch the news or Sports
Center on television. Until about thirty minutes before
the game, the mood is pretty casual. But then everyone
starts getting on their game faces….
To be an umpire, you've got to be able to take criticism. You've got to have a tough mental
disposition. You've got to be a gentle personality at
times but at other times you've got to be the baddest ass
going. You've got to remember that everything you do is
being watched and analyzed, right or wrong …. A great
baseball player will fail seven out of ten times and he
is still called great. If I miss seven plays out of ten,
I wouldn't be permitted to umpire Little League….
By the end of the year there isn't anyone who isn't looking for a break, looking to get away
from the game for a while, to do something different. I
have a little ranch in eastern Texas called Field of
Dreams. At home I take care of the cattle, paint the
corral, work on the fences, mow the grass, work the hay
— whatever has to be done. It's therapy for me.
Sherry Davis, announcer, San Francisco Giants
Sherry Davis, a self-described
“belated hippie,” did not see a professional
baseball game until she was thirty and the theater group
she was in moved to San Francisco. Performing at night,
she went to baseball games because she wanted to be
outdoors — and soon she was hooked on the sport.
In 1992 the Giants public-address announcer left, and the team announced an open audition
for a new announcer. I thought what I perfect job —
baseball and performing, my two loves.
It took me about three hours to get my turn on the microphone, and I did what I thought was a
good audition…. In about a week I got a message on my
machine from the Giants to call them. I was very nervous.
I called, and the woman said I was one of ten
callbacks….
At the callback we each had a long audition…. After a while the front-office people came
back and Pat Gallagher proclaimed that they had decided
on an announcer: “We've picked someone who was
natural, wasn't forced, and yet had a lot of authority.
The winner is number nine, Sherry Davis.” Then all
the cameras turned to me and all the microphones were
shoved into my face. My life changed tremendously at that
point….
The most important attribute of any announcer is voice quality. You have to know how to use
your voice, how to modify your delivery as the
circumstance requires. If it is a very exciting moment in
the game, you must know how much to change your voice
when announcing the next batter. You don't want to go
over the top, but you do need to add a little something
to the delivery….
Announcing is performing, and it takes a lot of energy. I didn't realize how much when I started
out, and I used to berate myself during the middle of a
home stand when I didn't have enough energy to do my
laundry. Now I realize that during home stands I need to
take it easy on game days….
I have met quite a few older fans who confess that they didn't like the idea of a woman
announcer at the beginning, but that I've won them over.
I think over time they have come to recognize that I love
baseball and that my love of the game shows through my
voice….
I am very, very lucky. I never dreamed that I would be a part of baseball. The nicest thing
anyone said to me that first year was when I saw Orlando
Cepeda after getting the job — “You're family
now.” To be part of the baseball family is the
biggest thrill of all.
Dean Taylor, Assistant
General Manager, Atlanta Braves
The general manager's office oversees the acquisition, development, and evaluation of minor and
major league players. The job requires the skills of a
scout, attorney, and, at times, psychologist.
When I was a freshman at Claremont College, I was a premed major. I had just finished my
first semester and at the time I was not all together
convinced that that was what I wanted to do. One day I
read a column in The Los Angeles Times about the sports
administration program that Walter O'Malley had helped
start at Ohio University. As soon as I finished reading
the column, I said to myself, “That's what I want to
do.” That very afternoon, I went across the street
to the registrar's office and changed my major to
economics….
Sitting through the preparation for the draft is similar to being sequestered on a jury. In
essence, we lock ourselves into a hotel suite for about
three weeks and discuss all the players we are
considering for the draft. There are absolutely no
distractions. The organization must be totally committed
to the draft process, because it is the single most
important function that the Braves or any organization
goes through in a year….
Obviously, baseball has been very demanding of my personal life. If someone asked me right
now, “Dean, what are your hobbies?”, I'd probably scratch my head and say, “Working on
schedules?”
A final word from the
authors
Baseball organizations are in many ways no different from other modern American businesses. There
is ever-increasing bureaucracy, commercialization,
hierarchy, and quantification; and the bottom line
remains the bottom line.
But baseball is also significantly different in that its product is still a game — a game
that continues to be the country's “national
pastime,” despite growing competition from football
and basketball. Because the product is a game, there is
hoopla, excitement, and daily indeterminacy of wins and
losses. This is infectious. It seeps into the front
office, the press box, and even the changing rooms of the
ushers, vendors, and game-day staff. Added to this mix is
the enthusiasm of employees, who have had a serious
interest in the game since they were kids. It is not
surprising then that baseball people share the feeling of
being part of a select group — a baseball fraternity;
most baseball people love their jobs; and many who could
make more money elsewhere stay in baseball. Indeed, for
some, baseball is sacred — and the ballpark is church.