Playing with Tigers

In 1965 George Gmelch signed a contract to play professional baseball with the Detroit Tigers organization. Gmelch grew up sheltered in an all-white, affluent San Francisco suburb, and he knew little of the world outside. Over the next four seasons, he came of age in baseball’s Minor Leagues through experiences ranging from learning the craft of the professional game to becoming conscious of race and class for the first time.                Playing with Tigers is not a typical baseball memoir. Now a well-known anthropologist, Gmelch recounts a baseball education unlike any other as he got to know small-town life across the United States against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil rights protests, and the emergence of counterculture. The social and political turmoil of the times spilled into baseball, and Gmelch experienced the consequences firsthand as he played out his career in the Jim Crow South. Playing with Tigers immerses the reader in the life of the Minor Leagues, capturing the gritty, insular, and humorous life and culture of Minor League baseball during a period when both the author and the country were undergoing profound changes.  

"You don't need to have any particular team affiliation to enjoy this book. It really is a good book about a life journey that has a baseball flair to it."—Gregg Kersey, Gregg's Baseball Bookcase, "Playing with Tigers provides a wonderful, easy-to-follow anthropological view of an above-average minor league baseball player coming of age in a rapidly changing social environment."—Timothy Dodson, Journal of Sport History, "Gmelch's Playing With Tigers balances humility with grace, heartbreak with humor, and victory with defeat in a way that readers not only understand, but appreciate."—R. Zachary Sanzone, Spitball, "George Gmelch is to be congratulated for the courage it took to write this memorable chronicle of life and baseball in the 1960s."—Ron Briley, NINE, “A completely engaging, insightful tour of a lost era of the 1960s in baseball and America. . . . A ballplayer-turned-anthropologist, Gmelch skillfully applies his ethnographic skills to his own experience. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to want to read this fascinating, very personal, and often surprising story. Enthusiastically recommended.”—Robert Elias, author of The Empire Strikes Out   

George Gmelch is a professor of anthropology at the University of San Francisco and at Union College in Schenectady, New York. He is the author of fourteen books, including In the Field: Life and Work in Cultural Anthropology; In the Ballpark: The Working Lives of Baseball People, with J. J. Weiner (Bison Books, 2006); Inside Pitch: Life in Professional Baseball (Bison Books, 2006); and Baseball Beyond Our Borders: An International Pastime, with Dan Nathan (Nebraska, 2017).