Introduction
Baseball needs a Webster and a standing–Revision Board to keep the dictionary of the game up to date. The sport is building its own language so steadily that, unless some step soon is taken to check the inventive young men who coin the words that attach themselves to the pastime, interpreters will have to be maintained in every grand stand to translate for the benefit of those who merely love the game and do not care to master it thoroughly.
—Hugh S. Fullerton, “The Baseball Primer,”
The American Magazine, June 1912
In the early part of the 20th century an odd movement started: Its purpose was to suppress baseball slang. Time has obscured some of the details, but what it amounted to was a movement toward linguistic purity and away from sports-page baseballese at a time when it was booming and those outside fandom were confused. Important voices—Collier’s Weekly and the New York Tribune—were early leaders of the crusade.
In 1913 the Chicago Record-American began covering games two ways: one account in the slang of the time and, next to it, a description of the game in “less boisterous” terms. A Professor McClintock of the English department at the University of Chicago brought the matter to national attention when he suggested that the republic would be better served if baseball slang were dropped and if, for starters, the newspapers would start describing the sport in dictionary English.
The baseball slang of McClintock’s day was prolific and inventive. In his three-volume Dictionary of 1913 Baseball and Other Lingo (2001–2003), based primarily on reporting in the San Francisco Bulletin for Feb.–May 1913, Gerald L. Cohen unearthed no fewer than 21 different terms for pitcher: box artist, boxman, curvist, flinger, gunner, heaver, hillman, hurler, hurlster/hurlester, hurlsmith, mound artist, moundsman, moundster, pitcher, slab artist, slabman, slabster, slinger, speedburner, tosser, and twirler.
McClintock’s call came at a time when, for example, The Washington Post’s Joe Campbell (“the Chaucer of baseball”) would write, “Amie Rusie made a Svengali pass in front of Charlie Reilly’s lamps and he carved three nicks in the weather,” as a way of saying that Rusie had gotten Reilly to strike out.
A few managers and players actually agreed with McClintock, but there was little sympathy expressed by the press, which whipped McClintock’s notion into something big. “The question has assumed the importance of a national issue,” said an editorial in the Charleston News and Courier. “It has received editorial discussion in the columns of the most influential newspapers, and it has aroused interest from end to end of this baseball-loving land.” Calling the notion the “injury which is now proposed,” the paper went on to say, “It is to be hoped, and it may reasonably be expected, that the movement will not accomplish the results which its more radical advocates desire. Baseball stories told in conventional English are dull reading indeed; and it is a pertinent fact that the decadence of cricket in England is attributed by many British newspapers to the failure of the press to put brightness or ‘ginger’ into the descriptions of the game.”
The Washington Post chose to make fun of McClintock by describing play using dictionary English. Sample: “Johnson gave the batter a free pass to first” becomes “Mr. Johnson pitched four balls that in immediate sequence made a detour of the plate, which, according to the rules of the game, entitled the batter to go to first base, despite the fact that he had not even aimed his bat at the baseball in any one instance.” After a thorough roasting, the Post concluded, “Much of the English used by Professor McClintock himself was once regarded as slang.”
On the other hand, The Nation magazine saw the threat as a serious one and wrote about it as if it were a disease: “One of the most puzzling problems of this puzzling era is the effect wrought upon our native speech by contact with the national pastime.”
Grantland Rice, then “Sporting Editor” of the Nashville Tennessean, wrote a poetic rebuttal in a ditty called “Knocking Slang” which ended with this stanza:
Nix on this slang; it’s on the blink,
And my remarks are here emphatic.
The geek who slings it through the ink
Has beetles in his bush league attic.
Let’s slip in the Big Revive.
For scholarly and classic diction.
Come on you mutts now, with the dive
And do a Brodie at this fiction.
All of this was, of course, a passing controversy that amounted to little; but it did serve to drive home the point that baseball had its own ever-changing language and that it was not to be meddled with by learned disciples of the King’s English, no matter how many initials they had after their names.
