Northcoast

"IT is one of those underappreciated, `inside baseball' moments that ratify politics as the Ultimate Game.'' So begins a Michael Kramer column in U.S. News & World Report.

``Jack Germond produces a self-described `inside baseball' syndicated political column,'' writes William Prochnau in the Washington Post, ``with his partner, Jules Witcover.''

A couple of years ago, Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe said that the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak had been ``marvelous on the ``inside baseball'' of the Democratic Party.''

``The people in my state,'' said Richard Weiner, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, ``are interested in jobs, the economy and education. The rest is ``inside baseball.''''

The phrase has been used outside baseball for at least a decade. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, wrote Myra MacPherson in the Washington Post in 1978, ``chairs endlessly boring hearings, then cuts through testimony with ``inside baseball'' jokes that no visitors understand but laugh at, anyway.''

The meaning of the phrase can best be ascertained from a brief study of its origin. In ``Fungoes, Floaters and Fork Balls,'' a 1987 baseball dictionary, Patrick Ercolano defines the term as ``The style of play in which the offensive team tries to score one run at a time through such tactics as the bunt, the steal, the hit-and-run, the well-placed hit and the squeeze.''

The Baltimore Orioles of the 1890s perfected this type of play; the baseball was then ``dead,'' in contrast to the livelier ball of today, and usually traveled short distances even when a batter connected squarely. Wee Willie (``Hit 'em where they ain't'') Keeler of Baltimore was an exemplar of ``inside baseball,'' now frequently called ``scientific baseball;'' by the 1920s, along came Babe Ruth, then the livelier ball and a more wide-open, aim-for-the-fences game.

But the earlier style of play is still with us. Whitey Herzog, manager of the Kansas City Royals, who liked to put on the double steal or hit-and-run, was quoted in 1978 as saying, ``If you understand `inside' baseball, you got to love us.''

According to Red Barber, the former voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who now broadcasts from Tallahassee, Fla., the phrase was a familiar one to baseball fans: ``I've heard ``inside baseball'' ever since I've been in baseball. The idea of an inner circle, or sanctum sanctorum, goes back all the way to the days of tribal government.''

From its sports context comes its political or professional denotation: minutiae savored by the cognoscenti, delicious details, nuances discussed and dissected by aficionados.

In politics, candidates who say they want to discuss larger issues look down their noses at the journalists and think-tankers who bedevil them with questions about campaign techniques, fund-raising plans and poll results. To them, ``inside baseball'' has a pejorative connotation that the phrase never gained in the baseball world. There, out-of-season reminiscences by avid fans, accompanied by rumors about next year's activities, are called the ``Hot Stove League'' (7).