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1. Baseball

2. Definition.
• Baseball is a bat-and-ball
game played between two teams
of nine players each who take
turns batting and fielding

3. History of baseball in the United
States
• In the mid-1850s, a baseball craze hit the New York metropolitan area.
• By 1856, local journals were referring to baseball as the "national pastime" or
"national game". A year later, sixteen area clubs formed the sport's first governing
body, the National Association of Base Ball Players
• The games, which took place between the all stars of Brooklyn, including players
from the Brooklyn Atlantics, Excelsior of Brooklyn, Putnams and Eckford of
Brooklyn, and the All Stars of New York (Manhattan), including players from
the New York Knickerbockers, Gothams (predecessors of the San Francisco Giants),
Eagles and Empire, are commonly believed to be the first all-star baseball games
• The game's commercial potential was developing: in 1869 the first fully
professional baseball CLUB, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed and went
undefeated against a schedule of semipro and amateur teams.
• The first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball
Players, lasted from 1871 to 1875; scholars dispute its status as a major league.

4. How baseball has changed the english
language?
• As we wait for those magic words of February, “pitchers
and catchers report today,” we can reflect that the
influence of baseball on the English language is stunning,
strong, and at what appears to be an all-time real and
metaphoric high. Tough folks play “hardball,” save for when
they relent and ask a few “softball questions.” Everyone
seems to be willing to settle for a “ballpark figure,” and
there are still a lot of folks who ask you to “touch base”
with them. We sympathize with those who “can’t make it to
first base” or are “out in left field.” Retailers who run out of
sale items often offer us “rain checks.” Beginners are
“rookies,” those who easily master a given skill are called
“naturals,” and those who seem eccentric are labeled
“screwballs.”

5. • This creeping baseballese began its encroachment on
the American language years ago. “No other sport and
few other occupations have introduced so many
phrases, so many words, and so many twists into our
language as have baseball,” wrote Tristram Potter
Coffin in his 1971 study of baseball folklore, The Old
Ball game. “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 goalposts, still
know and use a great deal of baseball-derived
terminology.”

6. • But Coffin wrote his book before the term “inside
baseball” gained popularity outside baseball as a way
of describing inner-sanctum goings on. It was also
written in a simpler time when Yogi Berra was still a
mere mortal. Today, he seems to be quoted—“It’s deja
vu all over again,” “If you come to a fork in the road,
take it,” etc.—more often than Oscar Wilde, George
Bernard Shaw, and Bertrand Russell put together. It
was also a time before baseball terms worked into
international play via the World Wide Web—the term
“southpaw” yields more than 6 million hits when
entered into the Google search engine while “rookie”
racks up more than 117 million

7. • Any way you look at it the number of everyday terms that come from baseball is large.
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, 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.”

8. • First and foremost, the extent of baseball terminology in the
language is enormous. The first edition of my Dictionary, published
in 1989, had 5,000 entries; the second, 10 years later, had 7,000,
and in the most recent edition published in 2009 there were 10,000
entries tightly packed into what one reviewer called “a 974-page
doorstop of a volume.” The total number is much higher if you
count definitions rather than entries. In the third edition, there are
15 baseball meanings for “hook,” 13 for “slot,” 11 each for “break,”
“jump,” and “cut.” My chief editor of the book, Robert “Skip”
mcafee, and I are already compiling new baseball terms for the
fourth edition now penciled in for 2019.

9. • . The point is that there was an extensive vocabulary out there to borrow from. “Hit and run,” to
pick just one example, was a baseball term for a particular play that dated back into the late
nineteenth century but was adopted to describe a vehicular felony in the 1920s. A less gruesome
example is contained in the term “flyswatter,” coined by Dr. Samuel J. Crumbine, who in 1904 was
appointed head of the Kansas State Board of Health. Crumbine was taking a bulletin—on flies as
typhoid carriers—to the printer one day and stopped off to watch a ballgame, where he heard
“sacrifice fly” and “swat the ball,” etc., and immediately decided to call the bulletin “Swat the Fly.”
Only a few months later a man came to him with an instrument that he wanted to call a “fly bat,”
and Dr. Crumbine persuaded him to call it a “flyswatter.” The man in QUESTION was Frank Rose
whose son, Bob, retold the story in Reminisce magazine (Sept.–Oct. 1992), adding that his father
was a schoolteacher in Weir, Kansas, when he read of Crumbine’s anti-fly crusade. The doctor’s
literature gave him an idea. “My father was a scoutmaster at the time, so he had plenty of help for
any civic project he chose to take on. He acquired some yardsticks and screen wire from the local
lumberyard. Then he had his scouts saw the yardsticks in half, cut the wire into small squares, and
nail them together. The scouts decided to call their creations ‘fly bats.’”
• Then there is the fact that during the GAME’s formative years the newspapers developed and
defined their own baseball slang, which was adopted by the fans. Then came radio, which did more
of the same. The slang of the game infatuated and educated several generations of young
Americans who learned to define their successes and failures in life—including romance—in terms
of batting averages and progress around the bases

10. • For the young, baseball slang was especially appealing as it was
sometimes frowned upon by their elders. In the early part of the
twentieth century an odd movement started whose purpose was to
actually 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 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 that, for starters, the newspapers would
start describing the sport in dictionary English.

11. WEBS
• http://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/
article/how-baseball-has-changed-english-
language
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHVS3G
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