George Gmelch Playing With Tigers Summary

I love to read baseball books, but I have a hard time reading books about the minor leagues. Like a lot of minor league games, I find books about the minors to be dull, tedious, and unexciting. That’s why I was surprised by how much I enjoyed George Gmelch’s Playing With Tigers, a memoir about his days as a 60’s minor leaguer.

A former player turned Anthropology professor, Gmelch’s memoir recalls his playing days in the Detroit Tigers’ farm system. In the late 1960s At first, I thought Gmelch’s book was going to be another dull and slow-moving memoir that revealed little new insight into the minor leagues. Its slow beginning reinforced this idea. After about fifty pages though I realized I was mistaken.

With great humor, personal insight, recollection, and research, Gmelch succeeds in taking his readers back to a time where minor leaguers, void of modern technology, had to lean one another for support and camaraderie. Their salaries were as low as their, which meant sharing a

Most books about the minor league stick to what happens on the field and in the clubhouse. Gmelch takes us a step further from that environment by discussing his love for baseball as he grew up, women he loved and lost, personal decisions about his career, and his views on political and social aspects like Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. Gmelch’s discussion of these topics is where the book thrives. He not only recalls them with the aid of diaries he kept during his playing days, but his style of writing makes you empathize with him. My heart broke for Gmelch as he recalled difficult breakups with his first girlfriend, but I howled with laughter when Gmelch talked about the jokes he and his teammates played on one another. In his memoir, Gmelch conveys humility with grace, heartbreak with humor, and victory with defeat in a way that resonates with