PREFACE

to the

THIRD EDITION

Before the ink had dried on the first edition of this book, which was published in the spring of 1989, good people—fans of baseball, and both professional and self-taught lovers of American words—began to call and write with their lists of omissions from what I had deemed to be a work that defined the national game one entry at a time. I had thought that the dictionary pushed the whole business of baseball terminology and slang to its logical conclusion.

I was wrong.

That first edition, immodestly titled The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, contained 5,000 entries. With the help of more than a hundred new recruits and volunteer lexicologists led by the indefatigable Robert “Skip” McAfee, who signed on as editor for the second edition, the New Dickson Baseball Dictionary was published exactly 10 years later in the spring of 1999 with nearly 7,000 entries, which seemed, at the time, to be fairly close to definitive at last.

Wrong again.

Ten more years have elapsed, and you are now looking at The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, Third Edition. It contains no fewer than 10,000 entries and more than 18,000 definitions; and more than 400 people have helped with the project. If someone had told me at the very beginning of this undertaking that there would be 10,000 terms to define, I would have said this was impossible. This accomplishment is not one to be credited to the author and his army of lexical irregulars, but rather one to be scored to the game itself, with an assist to that rich and flexible entity known as the English language.

I twice underestimated the size of this undertaking for several reasons.

1. The language of the game is, as a roster of readers pointed out, more varied, complex, and fraught with subtle distinctions than I had originally imagined—sort of like the game itself. This was manifested in the number of terms that had more than one meaning. There are 15 baseball meanings for hook, 13 for slot, 11 each for break, jump, and cut, 9 apiece for crack, flip, and catch, and 8 for hole.

2. The game outside the lines has continued to change, occasioning the need for terms like wild card, realignment, Executive Council, interleague play, and contraction, to say nothing of terms of self-abuse like greenie and steroid. The growth of sabermetrics and other attempts to better understand the game through statistical terms has mushroomed.

3. Old-school terms that had worked when I began collecting terms to define are being supplemented or even replaced. The late Shirley Povich, writing in The Washington Post in 1996, summed it up for the old-school vocabulary of the game: “Almost gone from the language is the ‘curveball’ that was such a staple for so many generations. It’s the play-by-play orators who have substituted with the ‘sidearm’ and ‘forkball.’ The ‘screwball,’ too, has all but vanished from the lexicon of baseball. But the fastball has taken on multiple identities. Play-by-play men talk now of a ‘four-seam fastball,’ a ‘two-seam fastball,’ and ‘a cut fastball,’ whatever that is.” Since Povich’s passing, a new crop of pitching terms have come into play, including such verbal oddities as the Bugs Bunny changeup and the gyroball, the latter made instantly famous by Daisuke Matsuzaka in the spring of 2007.

So with 25 years—give or take a year—since I began writing down a list of terms to be defined, I can only now claim that this is as close as can be gotten to definitive; but given the nature of the game and the nature of the language, the collecting of information and the recruiting of new volunteers continues.

Paul Dickson
Garrett Park, Maryland