The language baseball announcers use to describe the action
on the field is stilted and repetitive. This is not to say that the
play-by-play man of each broadcasting team should be composing a sequel to Ulysses with every Texas-Leaguer, but a bit
more inventiveness would be nice. I am not typically one to trumpet how much
better things were in the past, but in the area of colorful descriptions of
events on a baseball diamond, THINGS WERE BETTER IN THE PAST.
I spent quite a while yesterday perusing an article entitled
“Baseball Jargon,” written for the journal American
Speech in April 1943. The article was quite comprehensive, and left me
pining for the good old days when the Nazis were the bad guys, the French were
brave and a fly ball was a cloud-buster.
Let’s take, for example, the Texas-Leaguer, described by the
article as a “fly ball hit over the infield and yet too short to be caught by
an outfielder.” Because the Texas-Leaguer caused such exasperation for
fielders, in 1943 if one occurred during a game, sports writers around the
nation could describe it as a “Sheeny Mike, banjo, humpback liner, plunker,
Japanese liner, drooper, looper, special, leaping Lena or a percentage hit.”
Leaving aside the racist connotations of the “Japanese liner,” and the anti-semitic slant of the "sheeny Mike," they are
still undeniably entertaining.
Homeruns might be the only area in which modern announcing
has kept pace with that of years past. When announcers crow that Buster Posey
has just gone yard, hit a bomb, jacked one out, or hit a dinger, I feel that
they are not noticeably worse off than when announcers declared that Stan
Musial had hit a circuit clout, a four-bagger, or ticketed, tagged or lofted one
into the stands.
Descriptions of bunts have also barely improved, in 1943
bunts were still laid or put down, though the ability to “dump” a bunt has
apparently degraded over time.
In what was surely an important policy insisted upon by the
player’s union in the 1970’s, descriptions of hitters and their abilities have
become far more complementary over time. In 1943 weak hitters were called
“cream puff, Yankee Doodle, buttercup or dauber-down hitters.” Nowadays, weak
hitters are called David Eckstein, but only if they are white and short.
While some of the archaic descriptions are best left in the
past, there are a few that would greatly improve the casual fans’ appreciation
of the game. When Jose Bautista takes one of his typically monstrous hacks, it would
be nice to hear the announcer remark that he “really unbuttoned his shirt on
that swing!” And, after Bautista fails to reach base in a game it would greatly
improve my enjoyment of the post-game show if a commentator were to mention
that Bautista had been “horse-collared” that day.
The most sadly lacking area of description in the modern
game seems to lie in comparisons between a player’s performance prior to and
during the game. While modern announcers would happily comment that a pitcher
looked good in practice but had a tough day once he got on the mound, he would
doubtless never call such a pitcher a “Fancy Dan,” or a “dressy pitcher” who
turns “sour” when it counts. On the hitting side, no matter how often an
announcer may comment on a player’s “batting practice power,” none would ever
dare to call someone who hits better in practice than in a game a “two o’clock
hitter.”
Changes in the way the game is played and parsed have also
led to changes in the jargon used by reporters and announcers. In a world in
which complete games were the norm and not an extreme rarity, it was common to
refer to a pitcher whose only crime was failing to complete the game as being
“derricked, relieved, sent to the showers, knocked off the mound, or batted out
of the box.” While announcers today will typically say that a pitcher who has
been demolished has been sent off for a shower, merely being removed from a
game before its completion would scarcely be grounds for any comment
whatsoever.
A more subtle change can be seen in how walks were perceived
in 1943 as opposed to the present day. The commonly used terms in World War II
for a walk included “to stroll, get ticketed, get an Annie Oakley, get free
transportation, get a handout, get four wide ones, or to be passed.” While
there is certainly a great deal of interesting variety here; I have no idea
what Annie Oakley has to do with baseball, what is noticeable is the lack of
agency assigned to the batter in these descriptions. The idea of a walk being a
“handout” from the pitcher, or the batter receiving “free transportation,”
paints the walk as an act fully under the control of the pitcher and the
umpire. This sense is confirmed by the very next sentence of the article, which
reads: “If, however, a pitcher’s control is good, the batter may strike out,
fan, whiff, go down swinging, or hit a line drive to the catcher.” So, if the
pitcher’s control is good, he can induce the batter to “hit a line drive to the
catcher” (probably my favorite phrase in the article), if it is not good, the
batter will walk.
Thanks to the rise of sabermetrics and the popularity of
Moneyball, walks are increasingly treated in modern times as the result of a
conscious battle between the pitcher and the hitter (with the unwelcome
intrusion of Angel Hernandez from time to time). Teams now pay top dollar for
on-base ability, and not even the famously laggardly Twins would claim that
walks are solely the fault of the pitcher.
The fact that a modern day announcer would never imply that
a batter had no part in drawing a walk suggests that even though announcing may
have gotten drier since the good old days, it may have become ever so slightly
more insightful at the same time. Still, I feel that modern day announcing and
sports reporting would be infinitely improved by referring to Hunter Pence as a
“hitchy-koo,” instead of simply calling him twitchy or nervous.