Doug Glanville with Chase Utley in June, 2024 when the Phillies played the Mets in the London Series. (Credit: Doug Glanville)
PHILADELPHIA - Doug Glanville has always been more than a ballplayer.
A veteran of nine Major League Baseball seasons - six spent with the Phillies - and more than 1,100 career hits, Glanville has transformed his life in baseball into a second act that is as nuanced and thoughtful as his playing career was consistent.
Not only does he do analysis on both television and radio, he hosts an informative and entertaining podcast with Jayson Stark of The Athletic. He teaches college courses.
And now, he's writing on his own Substack.
Glanville launched his own site called Welcome to Glanville in March. He has been consistently posting to the site about three times a week, on average, chockfull of great stories about life and baseball and the intersection of the two.
Now 54, it's an outlet for him to continue to share his life in baseball with the public. But for Glanville, storytelling wasn’t a backup plan. It was, and still is, a calling.
A young Jimmy Rollins once learned a tough lesson from Scott Rolen during his rookie season, according to Doug Glanville. pic.twitter.com/qJ6SOQ7OUq
"The love of the media side of what I've been able to turn this second career into came through writing," Glanville said prior to calling Sunday Night Baseball between the Phillies and New York Mets for ESPN Radio. "That's really where it started."
Long before his analyst work with ESPN or his bylines in The New York Times, Glanville found refuge and rhythm in the written word.
His father, he said, was a self-published poet. Writing, then, was not just a skill; it was a language of memory and emotion.
“When he passed away... I kind of found another way to connect to him,” Glanville said. “I didn't find the connection with him through photos or video... it was really writing. It kind of made him feel close to me."
Glanville's passion for the craft came alive in 2007 when the Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drugs dropped. As a former player and union rep with first-hand experience of the steroid era's complexities, Glanville saw a vacuum in the discourse—one devoid of player nuance and insider context.
"I saw a lot of name calling... but I was looking for the player nuance, and there wasn't a lot out there," he said. "That's really what got me kind of out of my chair post-retirement and reconnecting with the game."
That piece, and those that followed, led him to ESPN. Yet Glanville never let go of the long-form.
He wrote a book in 2010 has written columns for ESPN and the Times among other places. But the Substack is different.
Today, Welcome to Glanville, serves as both diary and platform. His in-depth posts, blend his experiences, observations, and memories into stories that are as much about life as they are about baseball.
"It became very deeply personal and therapeutic on some level to write," he said. "It is kind of how I think and how I talk."
The writing is reflective, often insular. He doesn’t write simply to opine on current events. He writes to communicate something enduring.
"Baseball's so poetic already," he said. "You're just sitting on so many stories anyway."
Glanville decided to lean fully into the written word again, launching his Substack as a response to both personal need and industry shifts.
"I knew the bottom line was I want to write consistently," he said. "And I was kind of pulling my hair out... I'm around these amazing environments in baseball every week... and I'm just sitting on my hands."
For Glanville, the contemporary media landscape—fragmented, fast, and often shallow—lacks the rooted sense of voice and purpose that once defined beat writing and sports columns.
"There wasn’t a rooted sensibility around who you want to be," he said. "I wanted to be more of a conscience."
Why did Ryan Dempster intentionally hit Doug Glanville to begin a game?
A great story from Glanville on the lastest Cubs Weekly Podcast: https://t.co/Yu1hOFV1ri pic.twitter.com/wBIoq3xFe2
That conscience shows in his stories, many of which blend baseball with personal, familial, or cultural significance.
He shared how relatives in North Philadelphia had boycotted the Phillies for decades due to their treatment of Jackie Robinson. They never returned—until Glanville was traded to Philadelphia.
"You're talking like 40 years later," he said. "So baseball was not... about sticking to sports. It was a moment of community."
He knows his strengths as a writer are not in breaking news or scoops. Rather, it's in metaphor, connection, and perspective.
"Let me just focus on where I'm good and what I know," he said. "I'm a very good analogy person. I can connect it to other life experiences... hopefully, in the end, people say, 'Oh yeah, baseball is really life.'"
The reception to Welcome to Glanville has been overwhelmingly positive. He revels in the feedback, the conversations, and even the high school teammates who jump into chat rooms to reminisce about old games and bus rides.
"It was a moment I realized, oh, this is actually reciprocal," he said. "This isn’t just me. People take it to a whole other place."
Though he took a semester off from teaching college courses - he's taught at Yale, Penn, and most recently UConn, where he has lectured on sports and society - he says he’s eager to return to the classroom.
For Glanville, teaching, like writing, fulfills a desire not just to inform, but to build lasting conversations.
Glanville is also attuned to the shifting sands of media, recognizing both the democratization of publishing and its downsides.
"You get voices from different places," he said. "But on another hand... I do miss that rhythm and rigor."
Yet, his aim remains steady: to tell the stories that matter, and to do so with craft and conscience. Whether it’s a tribute to his late uncle, who supported him through minor league towns like Prince William and Winston-Salem, or an essay on the grace and humility baked into baseball’s daily grind, Glanville writes with a voice that is lived-in, literary, and always sincere.
"There's no labor in it," he said. "I'll go home tonight after the game and write."
Doug Glanville doesn’t just write about baseball. He writes about everything baseball contains—history, family, failure, and hope. And in a fast-paced, often impersonal sports media landscape, his stories are a reminder of what writing can be: connection, catharsis, and community.
