Inside “Inside Baseball”

We were talking earlier about the old college try and how that’s a term that comes from the early years of baseball, and it occurs to me, Grant, that another one of those terms is inside baseball. That refers to a particular style of play that emphasized sneaky strategies like bunts or chopping the ball so it bounces really high or runners being super aggressive about stealing bases.

It’s all about clever teamwork and quick thinking as opposed to the power hitting that came later in baseball. That was referred to in the early days of baseball, late 19th century, early 20th century, as inside baseball. And over the years, it moved outside of baseball and became used as a term for highly specialized knowledge about anything.

Yeah, I have an entry for that in my dictionary of political slang, and it’s a term that I like quite a bit. It is used in politics. The inside baseball of politics tends to be that knowledge that never quite escapes to the voters about how the systems work and about how the campaigns are operated.

Right, right. And I was just so fascinated that it actually referred to a particular style of play early on in baseball. I learned that from the wonderful Baseball Dictionary by Paul Dixon.

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