Inside ‘Inside Baseball’: How America’s Pastime Invented a Handy Metaphor

These days, inside baseball is anything “known or understood only by a small group of people,” per Merriam-Webster. It’s not always that outsiders aren’t smart enough to grasp the information—often, the implication is more that it’s too detailed or jargon-heavy for them to follow or find interesting. To the casual Netflix viewer, for example, an examination of how Netflix tracks and reports streaming statistics is inside baseball.

And to the casual user of the phrase inside baseball, a deep dive into its origins might also be inside baseball. But we’ll try to keep the jargon to a minimum.

1. Not Your Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather’s Baseball
2. Mind Games
3. Inside Baseball Gets Political

Not Your Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather’s Baseball

Toward the end of the 19th century, baseball players began to challenge established notions of how the game should be played. Maybe, they thought, the simple approach of swinging hard at every pitch and hoping for a home run wasn’t the only—or even the best—way to win.

So a new approach emerged that focused more on teamwork and strategy. Since the point was to score runs, players and coaches drew from all the tactical tools at their disposal to help each runner cross home plate. Steals assumed a much greater significance. Take the standard hit and run, in which the runner on first starts to steal second, causing either the shortstop or second baseman to move to cover that base. The batter then aims a hit right into the gap created by that shift—leaving defense to scramble for the ball as the batter safely reaches first base and the stealer makes it to second (or even third). Bunt plays gained popularity, too—like the sacrifice bunt, wherein a batter bunts to give a runner or runners time to advance around the bases while he himself likely gets out. 

The man widely credited as the pioneer of this style of play was Ned Hanlon, a former pro baseballer who became the manager of the Baltimore Orioles in 1892. Hanlon’s Orioles were almost immediately legendary, clinching three National League pennants that decade and, in doing so, encouraging other teams to take a page out of their playbook. (It was also these Orioles who gave us the Baltimore chop, in which a batter aims a hit almost straight down. The resulting bounce is ideally high enough for the batter to safely reach first and for any other runners to advance before the ball is fielded.)

Mind Games

By the early 20th century, so-called “inside baseball” (or “scientific baseball”) was an integral part of the sport, and teams built on Hanlon’s foundation in every direction. The Chicago Cubs were key in developing its defensive potential, which centered on good communication between fielders and pitchers: If fielders knew what kind of pitch to expect, they could better predict each hit and adjust position accordingly.

As the bounds of inside baseball expanded, the meaning of the phrase itself lost clarity. “The development of inside baseball in the first decade of the 20th century has been great or little, according to what that widely discussed, flexible, and, to the average patron of the game, mysterious term is made to apply,” the Chicago Tribune’s Sy Sanborn wrote in 1911. “Definitions are many and their limits vague.” Brooklyn pitcher Don “Pat” Ragan had illustrated as much with his own definition just a few months earlier: “something which occurs during a ball game that can be explained no other way.” Inside ball, he said, was “a phrase used to make baseball psychological.”

Ragan’s explanation, ambiguous as it was, identified the unifying germ within most conceptions of inside baseball: It was mental, not physical. Fake-outs, signals, anything mapped out beforehand, and even improvised plays that looked intricate—they all required an acumen that was practically invisible to most baseball viewers. Plenty of people pointed out that inside baseball couldn’t work without outside baseball; i.e., if players couldn’t hit, pitch, and field balls with precision and strength, they wouldn’t be able to execute any clever plan.

But even when the two functioned together, crowds cheered for what they could see. To “the average man who played baseball in his youth,” one reporter wrote in 1907, “it is a case of sheer, unthinking, superior curve or speed in the pitcher, preponderant ability of hand and eye in the batter, greater genius in the acquisitive hands of the fielder.” Everything else was inside baseball.

Inside Baseball Gets Political

Inside baseball in the literal sense is now a relic referring to the more cerebral kind of game ushered in by Hanlon and his acolytes. It helped form the fundamentals of modern baseball, and its rationale echoes through any discussion on the merits of small ball—batting tactics that inch runners toward home rather than clearing them with home runs. You could even argue that there’s an inside-baseball sensibility to sabermetrics: the success-through-statistics strategy that Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill simplified for laypeople in Moneyball (2011), based on Michael Lewis’s eponymous book. Inside baseball has also been used more broadly in reference to any insider intel about baseball.

But the phrase’s most active sense by far is metaphorical. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, political journalist Thomas L. Stokes was the first person to recognize (or at least publish an article about) a version of inside baseball in politics.

“There is such a thing as ‘inside politics’ which the folks in the grandstands and bleachers seldom see and rarely understand, just as crowds watching our great national pastime miss the fine points of what is called ‘inside baseball,’ ” he wrote in 1951. “ ‘Inside politics is played in congress by clever operators—sometimes called lobbyists—who often get what they want out of a confused and complex situation in which there is a different and larger over-all objective as the public sees it.” The following year, David Lawrence harked back to traditional inside baseball when he wrote that “There is a right way and a wrong way to play ball on a team, and the evidence thus far indicates that the Eisenhower staff is going to have to learn its ‘inside baseball’ the hard way.”

As the 20th century progressed, political journalists stopped overexplaining the connection and started using inside baseball as actual shorthand. But what exactly it’s shorthand for—in politics and beyond—varies by context. There could be an intentional lack of transparency involved, as there was with Stokes’s wheeling and dealing lobbyists; or it could be a straightforward reference to dull technical minutiae. Unless you’re talking to a baseball historian, in which case the phrase might not be figurative at all.

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