Inside baseball

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Inside baseball is a colloquial term in American English referring to "behind-the-scenes" conversations or dialog that the average member of the public would have no way of being privy to. This term has its origins in the work of Bill James, a sportswriter who eschewed the use of insider perspective as a mean to analyze the game of baseball. At the time of the James began publishing his epic "Bill James Baseball Abstract" the term "inside baseball" was used by sportswriters to imply that they had special access to inside information as well as the perspective of an insider to understand and process that information. James, however, analyzed baseball from a purely statistical perspective and ignored "the chatter bouncing off the dugout walls...the glint in the eye of a superstar...[and] the routines and integral boredom of baseball's lifestyle, with which each player great and small must content."[1] James referred to this statistical approach as "outside baseball" [2].

[edit] Use beyond baseball

Since the publication of James' work, the term "inside baseball" has come to be used in other contexts beyond baseball. Generally the term is used to indicate a discussion focused on behind-the-scenes discussions and particulary on personnel issues. For instance, political reporters may use the term to refer to discussions of what staff a political candidate has hired and what that may indicate about their political prospects. Also, the term could be applied to certain legal news television programs, on which discussions about how a particular judge came to sit on the bench, and the political considerations behind a pending ruling (i.e. inside baseball) may overshadow a discussion on the actual merits of the case (i.e. outside baseball).