Word.ws English Dictionary

inside baseball

inside baseball noun: technical matters concerning baseball generally not apparent or of interest to spectators.

Noun

inside baseball (uncountable)

  1. (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.
    • “Harry, if that’s what you are worried about, forget it. I didn’t even mention that in the story. To be honest, it’s of course vitally interesting to you, but as far as a newspaper story goes, I thought it was too much inside baseball.”1994, Michael Connelly, The Concrete Blonde, page 291
    • 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

Forms of inside baseball

alternative forminside-baseball

Questions about inside baseball

What does inside baseball mean?
Inside baseball means technical matters concerning baseball generally not apparent or of interest to spectators.
What part of speech is inside baseball?
Inside baseball is a noun.

Words near inside baseball in the dictionary

  1. inside
  2. inside address
  3. inside addresses
  4. inside back
  5. inside backs
  6. inside baseball
  7. inside centre
  8. inside centres
  9. inside dealing
  10. inside diameter
  11. inside diameters

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: inside baseball (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-inside baseball.ogg.

Cite this entry: “inside baseball.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/inside_baseball. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.