'Baseballically Speaking'

By Nathan Bierma

As baseball emerged in the nineteenth century as the country’s leisure activity of choice to spell the mind from the monotony of industrial life, the language used to describe the game similarly relaxed, enjoyed itself, and unwound from the rigors of its usual constraints. When readers of early twentieth century sports pages opened the newspaper, they were confronted by such poetic headlines as: “Blame Cub Slump on Slim Slab Corps” or “Shallow Hurling Balks Bucs ‘n’ Birds” (Rushin 20, 61). They might find out that the star player was called out at the plate, or “expired at the cash register.” The opposing pitcher didn’t take the mound, he “toed the alien humpback.” When the losing team rallied, “Mr. Mo Mentum changed uniforms” (Rushin 20). A low scoring game would have several zeroes on the inning-by-inning scoreboard, thus becoming “an egg feast” (Dickson 145). A player wouldn’t steal a base, he would “swipe a hassock” (Dickson 386). 

Vivid, risky, inventive, and descriptive, baseball’s language helped etch the game into American lore as the national pastime. To this end, baseball language was not just a chance to rest from more formal English; it was an imaginative attempt to capture the magic of the game.  New York baseball writer Richards Vidmer recalls how he tried in his game reports to do more than just sum up the play-by-play.

I always figured you could read a box score and know what happened. I still do. When I’d write a ball game, I’d write about some particular thing, not ‘In the first inning Gehrig singled to right … and in the third inning so-and-so grounded into a double play.’ To hell with that…. I used to start my story with some angle” (Holtzman 103).

It was Vidmer who once led a piece about a batter walking in the winning run with the bases loaded by writing, “He serves who also stands and waits” (Holtzman 103). 

A more durable legacy, perhaps, than the still-startling turns of phrase of baseball reporters, belongs to the voluminous catchphrases and jargon used by players, managers, writers, announcers, and fans alike as baseball became a national experience. So dominant is their presence in America’s most storied sport that they found a niche in everyday speech as well. Red Smith identifies the broader presence in spoken English of “rain check,” “right off the bat,” “go to bat for,” “get to first base,” “ballpark figure,” “play hardball,” and so forth. Although Smith warns that when “sportspeak” gets out of control it results in “barbarisms whose use should be a misdemeanor if not a capital offense,” he nonetheless concludes that overall, “there is nothing objectionable about this subdivision of language. Indeed, some expressions deliver the message about as clearly as possible” (Smith).

Long before Smith raised his concern about abuse when baseball comes in contact with English, former Yankee president Edward Barrow, the man who traded for Babe Ruth, produced a rousing adverbial phrase that may encapsulate the phenomenon, when he said, “The Babe was one of my children, you know, baseballically speaking” (qtd. in Dickson 36). (If we assume Barrow to be a good family man, this qualifier is as important as it is remarkable.) Indeed, in an exploration of some of the terms, synonyms, and parts of speech that developed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, we find that baseball produced a literature all its own. In the effort to transform the cold type of inning-by-inning accounts, writers made their words dance with the flourish of fiction.

For example, the ball was seldom just a “ball,” but an “apple,” “egg,” “pellet,” or “pill.” A fielder’s mistake might be called a “foozle,” especially if he was of limited skills, or a “flivver” (although the tongue-gratifying “flivver’s foozle” does not seem to occur in print) (Dickson). Such an ill-fated player might feel the need to be a “pebble hunter,” searching for stones on the infield to blame for the ball’s errant path. At least one player reportedly went as far as to distribute pebbles across the ground to provide culprits for whatever mistakes would transpire (Dickson 292). (The “pebble” language had many offshoots. In the fateful Game 7 of the 1924 World Series between the New York Giants and the Washington Senators, a ground ball in the 12 inning did in fact hit a stone and carom over Giants fielder Freddy Lidstrom’s head into the outfield, allowing the Senators to score the championship-winning run. It was called the “Pebble Play”) (Dickson 292). 

Before the ball even challenged an infielder, it had several linguistically colorful options. It was delivered by a pitcher, first called a “hurler” in print in Baseball magazine in 1908, and elsewhere a “twirler” or even an “elbow bender.” He might throw a “scroogie,” or “screwball,” a pitch with a nasty curve. Or he could elect to use a slower pitch, a “blooper ball” or “eephus” that swooped toward the plate. New York Yankee pitcher Steve Hamilton called his version a “folly floater.” Mike Bodicker’s combination of a “changeup” and “fork ball” was dubbed a “fosh ball.”  If the pitcher threw a fastball close to the batter, it might be referred to as a “rib roaster” or “chin music.” Less confrontational is the curve ball, the “yellow hammer” – a term that has completely puzzled etymologists (Dickson).

The batter had a comparable number of vocabulary possibilities. Wielding his “cudgel,” as Baseball magazine christened the bat in 1908, he might produce only a weak grounder, a “drizzler,” or, as the New York Evening Journal beautifully described it in 1909, a “whisperette.” If the batter hit it weakly into the air, it was just a “palomita,” the Spanish word for “little dove.” A more formidable hit was a “line drive” or “frozen rope.” Better yet, if he could really “whang” the ball, he would hit a home run, a “downtowner,” “Dr. Long Ball,” “goner,” or “round tripper.” Then he would be a real “slugger,” “sockdolager,” or “swatsmith” (Dickson).  If not, he might be called just a “one o’clock hitter,” who hit quite well during batting practice – which in the era before night games was always at 1:00 p.m. – but could not match this prowess when the game started at two. (Of course, when game time was later moved to 3:00 p.m., it was no longer to a player’s credit to be a “two o’clock hitter”) (Dickson 284). 

Allusions to popular culture spiced up baseball reporting. A headline from the San Fransisco News-Call Bulletin in 1948 announcing a Cleveland Indians victory: “Leman’s No-Hitter Lift to Tribe, Only Three Tigers Get On, All Via Annie Oaklies.” The headline writer assumes reader familiarity with the musical Annie Get Your Gun, in which one of Annie Oakley’s sharpshooting tricks was to puncture the symbols from playing cards at a distance. Since free passes to baseball games came in the form of punched tickets, resembling Annie’s pierced cards, and since a synonym for walking a batter was “a free pass,” a base-on-balls could be considered an “Annie Oakley.” Readers were assured by the headline that the pitcher had indeed not 
surrendered a hit – only three walks (Dickson 28).

Although baseball clubs came from the country's new urban centers, the game sprung from America’s agricultural heart, and this is also reflected in the language. Paul Dickson, introducing his copious dictionary of baseball terms, speaks of the “remarkably pastoral” side of the game and its language, beginning with the word “ballpark” (Dickson xv).  More specifically, “farm teams” and “farmhands” in the minor leagues, going the “cob-fence route,” hearkened to a game played near the crops and fences of rural existence. Relief pitchers of all leagues still warm up in the “bullpen.” There is an “infield” and an “outfield,” “outer garden,” or “outer path.” At one time, runners loaded the bases like “ducks on a pond,” only to see a batter strike out with a long, loping swing, a “cowtail” swishing through the air. Only a game with an almost spiritual sense of the land, perhaps, could elevate a groundskeeper to the reverential post of “sodfather” (Dickson).

The field might was sometimes named for people as well as places. When Fenway Park was built in Boston in 1912, the outfield featured a steep 10-foot incline sloping up toward the left field wall (or “Green Monster”). Before its was removal it 1933, it was navigated skillfully by Red Sox left fielder Duffy Lewis, inspiring fans to call the mound “Duffy’s Cliff” (Dickson 140). 

Exploring the origins and evolution of certain terms in depth lends a sense of how complex such life cycles can be. The extinct terms are particularly intriguing. The term “bingle,” for example, which first appeared in Sporting Life in 1902 as a synonym for a base hit, has been the subject of some debate, even after it almost completely disappeared from baseball speech.  David Schulman delved into the matter in American Speech journal in 1937, suggesting “bingle” was a blend of “bang” or “bing” and “single.” But later that year, linguist Peter Tamony responded in the same publication, agreeing that the “onomatopoetic bing, the sound of the bat solidly meeting the ball” was at work, but insisting that the original term was “bingo.” Tamony also found his ancestor in 1902, in The Sporting News: “‘Truck’ Egan is showing his form of other seasons, playing a swell short and getting his timely bingoes as of yore.” But he could not place it in print before “bingle” earlier in the year, and we are left to wonder which was more prevalent in spoken speech at the time (Dickson 55). 

Another largely obsolete term with obscure origins is “fungo”: the act of tossing a ball in the air and hitting it to an outfielder during practice. It was used as a noun, verb, and adjective, and has been traced to words for hit, bat, catch, and toss, among others. In fact, William Safire compiled thirteen different theories on the word’s roots in his book What’s the Good Word. Among the most significant possible ancestors are fungor, “fun and go,” “fungible,” “fungus,” fangen, and fung.  Fungor is Latin for “perform, execute,” from which we get “function,” but this has not been a popular interpretation of origin. More plausible is Schulman’s suggestion in American Speech that the word is a compound of “fun and go.” Hy Turkin elaborates in his 1956 Baseball Almanac, where he describes the batter of fungoes shouting to outfielders, “One go, two goes, fun goes” (Dickson 172). In a different vein, Zander Hollander in Baseball Lingo defines “fungible” as something substituted for something else, and since special thin bats were used in warm-ups in place of game bats, “fungo” could refer to them. Dueling theories outside the sports realm also enter the debate. Etymologist Gerald Cohen of the University of Missouri traces the word to the German word fangen, meaning “to catch” (which was, after all, the purpose of the fungo exercise for outfielders). Cohen found a New York World story from 1889 to back him up.  Meanwhile, Joan H. Hall of the Dictionary of American Regional English called Safire’s attention to the Scottish word fung for “toss, fling,” and an 1804 passage that says, “‘Ye’ witches, warlocks, fairies, fien’s! Daft fungin’ fiery pears an’ stanes.” Hall points to the act of tossing the ball before it is hit to the practicing players, and to the common structure of game names consisting of a root and “-o” (like “bingo” and “keno”). Out of all the possibilities, no consensus has emerged (Dickson 172).

Sometimes baseball language replaces its own words with synonyms over generations. In the nineteenth century, “crank” was a more common term for “spectator” than was “fan.” Today “crank” survives only as a word for hit, as in, “He really cranked it to left field,” but this usage does not appear to be related. In the 1880’s, “fan” began to gain currency, first appearing in print in 1889 in the Kansas Times & Star: “Kansas City baseball fans are glad they’re through with Dave Rowe as a ball club manager” (qtd. in Dickson 153).  Despite the traditional assumption that “fan” is simply shorthand for “fanatic,” persuasive cases have been made that the word is actually short for “fancy,” which traces back to the early eighteenth century as a term for well-to-do spectators of boxing.  Pierce Egan, considered by some to be the father of sports slang, wrote in his 1818 book Boxiana, “The various gradations of the fancy hither resort to discuss matters incidental to pugilism” (qtd. in Dickson 154). Much later, manager Connie Mack insisted “fan” referred to spectators who fanned themselves to keep cool. Still, most agree that fan entered baseball parlance after being shortened from “fanatic” by St. Louis Browns owner Chris Von der Ahe in 1883 (Dickson 155). 

Another surviving baseball word that generates much discussion among etymologists is “southpaw,” for left-handed pitcher. Traditionally this has been understood in terms of the geographical location of such a pitcher’s arm in consistently aligned ballparks. When early twentieth century ballparks were built – exclusively for day games, of course – home plate would be placed to the west, so that the late afternoon sun would not shine into a batter’s eyes. This would leave the left-handed pitcher facing south, and his arm would uncoil from his windup on the south side of the mound. Sportswriter Charles Dryden challenged this theory by claiming a certain left-hander from Southpaw, Illinois once tried out for the Cubs, prompting Chicago sportswriters to refer to him and other lefties by his hometown. However, no maps showing a town called “Southpaw” have ever been discovered, although there is a “South Pekin” and “South Park” in Illinois. In 1951, sportswriter Harry Grayson verified the geographical layout theory, finding that all major parks at the time had home plate to the west. Only Stumpf Field in Lancaster, Pennsylvania failed his test. Grayson reported in the San Fransisco News that at Lancaster Red Roses minor league games, “25 minutes or so have to be taken out of a late afternoon, or until the sun sinks below the horizon. It is remindful of the English dropping everything for tea in the middle of a cricket match” (qtd. in Dickson 366). Although the proliferation of night games has since reduced the geographical concern of stadium planners, this “southpaw” theory stands, for the most part, unchallenged (Dickson 366). 

One baseball phrase that thrives in modern speech is “out in left field,” as a description of oblivion, eccentricity, or even insanity. At first the explanation seems obvious: left field is a good distance from home plate, so the occupant is detached from the action and can’t easily determine what is going on. But as Dickson writes, “right field is just as remote and, at the lower levels of the game at least, more likely to be populated by an odd player” (288).  Dickson outlines two major theories, both with very specific origins. One holds that Yankee fans in the 1920s who bought tickets in left field had the notable disadvantage of sitting far away from Babe Ruth, who played right field at the time. Thus they not only showed poor judgment in selecting their seats but had a limited view of the star player as well, which satisfies the conditions of both  poor mental health and distance the phrase suggests today. A second theory involves the Neuropsychiatric Institue in Chicago, which various sources say stood behind left field of the old West Side Park in the nineteenth century. Doctor Gerald M. Eisenberg explains to William Safire: “In Chicago, when someone said that one was ‘out in left field,’ the implication was that one was behaving like the occupants of the Neuropsychiatric Institute, which was literally out in left field” (qtd. in Dickson 288). However, Alan Solomon, writing about West Side Park in the Chicago Tribune, states that the Neuropsychiatric Institute was not built until 1939, well after the Cubs had moved to Wrigley Field. Solomon told me by e-mail, "I'm 99 percent sure the story was invented ... by a creative University of Chicago professor. ... The one percent doubt is if a predecessor psych building existed before 1939 but after the park was abandoned by the Cubs following the 1915 season. But given the tight space (there's a heavily wooded courtyard there now), it would've been a very, very short porch." The debate continues.

Hatched in newspapers and raised by radio, baseball’s unique language is now primarily in the care of television narrators on baseball highlight shows, most notably ESPN. With terms and phrases such as “Aloha means goodbye,” “check please,” “Back back back!” “Boo-yah,” and “the whiff,” ESPN announcers enjoy a free-flowing postmodern interchange with the language of popular movies and music, other announcers, and players themselves, as all borrow from and lend to each other on a national, mass mediated basis. As ESPN anchors Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick write, “Apparently we live in a time when the catchphrase is America’s primary form of communication and evidently we’re a catchphrase factory” (Olbermann 9). Whether television catchphrases will someday be considered significant among the literary output of our time, and whatever evaluations of craft and artfulness (or lack thereof) we may make of the highlight narration genre, it is plain to see that the language of baseball will continue to set the game apart, to capture the imagination of fans, and to permeate the English language as a whole.

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