Introduction (4 of 4)
6. The major influence on baseball language was Henry Chadwick.
If one person had to be singled out for having the most influence on the official language of the game, it would be a pioneering Englishman named Henry Chadwick, but this may be only because he came along so early that he was essentially given the opportunity to fill in blanks. He wrote the first rule book, created the first box score, and served as one of the game’s first journalists. He also created many of the early instructional baseball manuals that were used during the latter half of the 19th century.
There have been several attempts to assign somebody else the title of Father of Baseballese. Among the contenders are a number of midwestern and western baseball writers who, writing in the late 19th century, had a great impact in building the vocabulary needed to describe the game. John Allen Krout, in his 1929 Annals of American Sport, gives some of their names: “Shortly after 1883 Leonard Washburn, Finley Peter Dunne, who earned national fame as the creator of Mr. Dooley, and Charles Seymour began to write their entertaining stories of Anson’s White Stockings for the Chicago papers.”
But all of this is somewhat misleading because so many people have had a continuing impact on the language of baseball. A very small and incomplete list would have to include Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, Earl Weaver, Red Barber, Yogi Berra, Ring Lardner, Red Smith, Dizzy Dean, Jim Murray, Gaylord Perry, Theodore A. “TAD” Dorgan, Alexander Cartwright, Pierce Egan, Jim Brosnan, Satchel Paige, Willard Mullin, Leo Durocher, Babe Ruth, and Dennis Eckersley.
7.
The influence of baseball on American English
at large is stunning and strong.
In The Old Ball Game (1971), that great work on the lore of baseball, Tristram Potter Coffin wrote, “No other sport and few other occupations have introduced so many phrases, so many words, so many twists into our language as has baseball. The true test comes in the fact that old ladies who have never been to the ballpark, coquettes who don’t know or care who’s on first, men who think athletics begin and end with a pair of goal posts, still know and use a great deal of baseball-derived terminology. Perhaps other sports in their efforts to replace baseball as ‘our national pastime’ have two strikes on them before they come to bat.”
Perhaps the best way to drive this home is to present a partial list of terms and phrases that started in baseball (or, at least, were given a major boost by it) but that have much wider application, to wit: A team, ace, Alibi Ike, Annie Oakley, back-to-back, ballpark figure, bat a thousand, batting average, bean, bench, benchwarmer, Black Sox, bleacher, bonehead, boner, box score, the breaks, breeze/breeze through, Bronx cheer, bunt, bush, bush league(r), butterfingers, charley horse, choke, circus catch, clutch, clutch hitter, curveball, doubleheader, double play, extra innings, fan, fouled out, gate money, get one’s innings, get to first base, go to bat for, grandstander, grandstand play, ground rules, hardball, heads up, hit and run, “hit ’em where they ain’t,” hit the dirt, home run, hot stove league, hustler, in the ballpark, in a pinch, in there pitching, “it ain’t over ’til it’s over,” “it’s a (whole) new ball game,” jinx, “keep your eye on the ball,” Ladies’ Day, Louisville Slugger, minor league, muff, “nice guys finish last,” ninth inning rally, off base, on-deck, on the ball, on the bench, out in left field, out of my league, phenom, pinch hitter, play ball with, play the field, play-by-play, rain check, rhubarb, right off the bat, rookie, rooter, Ruthian, safe by a mile, “say it ain’t so, Joe,” screwball, seventh-inning stretch, showboat, shut out, smash hit, southpaw, spitball, squeeze play, Stengelese, step up to the plate, strawberry, strike out, sucker, switch hitter, team play, Tinker to Evers to Chance, touch all the bases, two strikes against him, “wait ’til next year,” whitewash, “Who’s on First?,” windup, “you can’t win ’em all,” “you could look it up.”
Elting E. Morison, writing in American Heritage (Aug.–Sept. 1986), asked, “Why is baseball terminology so dominant an influence in the language? Does it suggest that the situations that develop as the game is played are comparable to the patterns of our daily work? Does the sport imitate the fundamentals of the national life or is the national life shaped to an extent by the character of the sport? In any case, here is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of what I think I heard Reggie Jackson say in his spot on a national network in the last World Series: ‘The country is as American as baseball.’”
