Introduction (3 of 4)
3. Basic ballyard slang comes back from obscurity.
Slang, we are always being told, is ephemeral. This is only somewhat borne out by baseball slang because, for every seemingly fleeting term or phrase, there seems to be one that hangs on for several generations. Many terms that began as slang have been so widely accepted and are used so routinely that they are no longer considered slang. This point was first made in an article in the Saturday Review in 1933 in which the author, Murray Godwin, pointed to the permanence of such “slang” as sacrifice and wind up. Compare this, for example, to the slang of popular music or high school, which seems to change constantly.
Etymologist Peter Tamony put it much more strongly. In his essay on the term “Dick Smith” (a name assigned to a loner in both baseball and horse racing slang), he wrote (Newsletter and Wasp, Sept. 15, 1939), “It is always amusing to be able to run down the history and origin of a real slang word. Real slang always laughs at the professors and others who hold that it is ephemeral. They mistake mere metaphor and simile for slang. To hold that slang is largely ephemeral is to say that dress is ephemeral because women’s fashions change four times a year. A large part of our slang has a long, long history, but records of it are short. It is only since the advent of the modern sports page, about 1900, that this vital and human aspect, this color of our speech, has been properly recorded.”
Baseball slang is in fact hard to kill, and specific terms have a way of asserting themselves after being written off as archaic. While researching this book, I encountered many articles that declared as dead terms that are still very much alive today. For example, a 1964 article in Baseball Digest, written by Tim Horgan of the Boston Traveler, tells us, “There are no more bleachers. They are now ‘porches.’” The same article reported that “No pitcher today . . . throws a fastball or, as our forefathers knew it, ‘a high hard one.’” In 1933, Damon Runyon described a hit that “used to be called” a “Texas Leaguer”; and in 1937, sportswriter Curley Grieve of the San Francisco Examiner told his readers, “A left-handed hurler is no longer a southpaw. He’s a cock-eyed hurler.”
Similarly, a 1982 article on baseball slang that appeared in the USAir in-flight magazine listed the term wheelhouse (for the area of the batter’s greatest hitting strength) as one of a number of bygone words that had “gone down swinging.” If the term is dead, no one has bothered to tell the many writers and sportscasters who use it regularly.
Then there is the term can of corn, which 20 years ago was annually declared dead but comes back as surely as Opening Day. “One phrase that’s out is can of corn,” wrote Scott Ostler in the Los Angeles Times (1986): “Several players warned me to stay away from that one.” New York Mets catcher Gary Carter deemed the term “ancient history” in an article in the St. Petersburg Times (1987) on the latest in baseball slang. But then it came back in a big way; it’s presently everywhere, and nobody is forecasting its demise. In fact, according to an article in USA Today (March 30, 2007) entitled “Do foreign executives balk at sports jargon?,” can of corn has become business jargon for “a decision or action that is a no-brainer; a product that sells itself.”
On the other hand, consider another vegetable. Several writers have reported the term pea (for a ball batted or pitched so fast that it can hardly be seen) as an example of the very latest in baseball lingo, even though it can be traced back at least to 1910. To fill out the platter, there is rhubarb, which never seems to have gone out of vogue since it made its baseball debut in the late 1930s.
4. Baseballese tends to be low-key and light.
Although some of the terms for whacking the ball with the bat are strong (to crush, smash, powder) and base stealing is aptly named, other actions are described in absurdly mild terms. The most glaring example can be heard when the pitcher throws the ball at the batter in an attempt to intimidate him. Terms associated with this act include bean and beanball, dust and duster, brush and brushback, knockdown, shave, and barber. It is sometimes called a purpose pitch or chin music. Such behavior may lead to a noisy and sometimes violent confrontation that is called a rhubarb.
Compare this to a headline run over a Washington Post interview with New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor a few days before Super Bowl XXI: “Taylor: ‘Kill Shots’ Make the Game.” Comedian George Carlin (Brain Droppings, 1997) has a routine in which he compares the pastoral game of baseball to football, which is played on a gridiron where there is blitzing, red-dogging, and drives into enemy territory, and where bombs are thrown. Baseball is played in a park, and the offensive plays include the free pass, homer, and sacrifice fly. In football you spear, march, and pile on; in baseball you walk, stretch, and run home. In an op-ed piece in The New York Times (Sept. 6, 1987), Steve Palay pointed out that the language of arms control is very close to that of football (throw weight, end run, hammering out an agreement, etc.), but that it would be better served if it were taken from baseball. “Arms control is not won,” Palay concluded, “it is played. And going into ‘extra innings’ sounds so much better than ‘sudden death.’”
“In baseball,” wrote Ira Berkow (The New York Times, June 24, 1986), “there is a certain lightness of spirit that doesn’t exist in football. What can you say about the ‘blitzes’ and ‘bombs’ in football other than try to avoid them? But not so baseball. On a Game-of-the-Week telecast, Vin Scully once noted that something was buzzing around the head of the batter, who then stepped out of the box to swat it. ‘That,’ said Scully, ‘must be the dreaded infield fly.’”
All of this is not to say that baseball terminology lacks a dark side. A letter from Jim Land of Felton, Calif., published in The Sporting News (Oct. 5, 1987), made the point: “Baseball terminology, steeped in tradition, pays tribute to chicanery. For example, stealing bases, stealing signs, cheating toward the lines, robbing homers and hits, stabs, swipes, bluffs and suicide squeeze are all part of the game. There are hidden ball tricks, faked tags and in-the-vicinity plays.”
5. Clubhouse chatter defies logic.
For reasons that are unclear, baseball seems driven to come up with its own terms for things that are used widely in other sports. Everywhere else, teams are piloted by head coaches; but baseball insists on managers (and with rare exception dresses them like players), and all the referees are called umpires. If other sports had to deal with discrimination and segregation, baseball dealt with the color line. Substitutes are good enough for most sports, but not for baseball, which insists on loading its benches and bullpens with firemen, pinch hitters, pinch runners, and platoon players. Baseball players never seem to turn, they always pivot. In realms as diverse as bowling and bombing, a strike is a hit; but in baseball alone it is a miss. Out of bounds works for everyone else, but baseball insists on foul territory. If the same facility is used for football on Sunday and baseball on Monday, it is transformed overnight from a stadium to a ballpark. And the locker rooms used by the football players become clubhouses for the baseball players.
