Think of Prof. George Gmelch as the Rip Van Winkle of baseball.
After having been absorbed by the sport through his early adulthood, he left it completely in 1969 when he was released by the Detroit Tigers organization.
More than two decades later, at the suggestion of his wife and colleague, Sharon Gmelch, the anthropologist woke up to baseball to do an ethnography of the sport. He talked about his return to the sport in a faculty colloquium titled “The Changing World of Professional Baseball” on Nov. 2.
Gmelch spoke about the changes in professional baseball over the last three decades, from economics to player personalities. If there was a subtext to the talk, it was that baseball, like all major sports, is a microcosm of American society and that changes in baseball reflect changes in the larger society and culture.
Gmelch said he had no interest in baseball after his release. “Often, I didn't even watch the World Series,” he said. “So, when I finally came back to the game in the early nineties, after Sharon convinced me that it could be interesting to do an ethnography of the sport, it was like Rip Winkle waking up after his 20-year sleep in the Catskills.”
Gmelch, the Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Anthropology, joined the College in 1982. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has led Union students on many anthropology terms abroad, perhaps most notably to Barbados.
He has written numerous journal articles on topics ranging from sport to tourism. His books include Inside Pitch: Lives in Professional Baseball; Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism; Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People; The Parish Behind God's Back: The Changing Culture of Rural Barbados (with Sharon Gmelch); and Double Passage: The Lives of Caribbean Migrants, Abroad and Back Home.