inside baseball

noun — 2 senses

inside baseball

noun
1

Ball games, Baseball, Games, Hobbies, Lifestyle, Sports US, Idiomatic Technical matters concerning baseball generally not apparent or of interest to spectators.

  • There always has been a tendency to overlook the catcher, possibly because so much of him is covered up during the game, but more because the greatest part of his work is inside baseball and of the kind which the general public can neither see nor appreciate.1914, Paul Withington, Lothrop Withington, The Book of Athletics, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard:
  • Here, the game is marked by the "little things" that have come to be defined as "inside baseball".1993, Michael A. Katovich, “Humor in Baseball: Functions and Dysfunctions”, in The Journal of American Culture, volume 16, number 2, pages 7–16:
2

US, Broadly, Idiomatic Matters of interest only to insiders.

  • But in fact, redistricting remained very much a game of inside baseball.2003, Sam Hirsch, “The United States House of Unrepresentatives: What Went Wrong in the Latest Round of Congressional Redistricting”, in Election Law Journal, volume 2, number 2, pages 179–216:
  • […] the more inside-baseball the name, the nerdier the subject matter.2015 June 11, Paul Ford, “What is Code?”, in Bloomberg:
Related terms
shop talk, small ball, talk shop

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.