Fan Friday – Kirsten Brown
Posted by twinsmvb on July 10, 2009 under John | 
Read the First Comment
I’m excited today to introduce our writer of this week’s Fan Friday column. Her name is Kirsten Brown and she is a girl who knows her baseball, specifically her Twins baseball! Check out Kirsten’s great article below and for more check out her blog at K-Bro’s Baseball Blog.
The Language of Baseball
I love writing. I love words and phrases and sentences and putting them all together to make meaningful and interesting communication. I love idioms and metaphors and expressions and painting pictures with prose.
I also love baseball. I love that there is no clock. I love the pace and the rhythm. I love the mental battle between the pitcher and the batter. I love it that every ball field is different. I love that they play until somebody wins. I love baseball for a million reasons, but my very favorite part is the language of the game.
Where else can one “toe the rubber,” “hit a can of corn,” or “hang one,” and all those things mean something? In what other sport can so many descriptions refer to the same thing, but yet be so different? A liner, looper, bleeder, blooper, duck fart, dying quail, Texas leaguer, scalder, knock, frozen rope, and screamer all mean “base hit,” but they conjure vastly different images. Bigger hits have their own names – blast, tater, shot, jack, moon shot, jolt, dinger, slam, long ball, tape-measure shot, and the recently-coined souvenir city to name a few. Oh, and don’t forget a grand salami.
In fielding you can have an atom ball, turn a twin killing, make a shoestring catch, go around the horn, play the hot corner, or wear the tools of ignorance. Pitchers can bring the heat, paint the corners, throw a meatball, serve a cookie, give him some chin music, throw a bean ball, be nasty, be filthy, or toss a gem.
Take, for example, the most beautiful play in my opinion: a curveball that starts high then breaks across the strike zone which amazes the batter so much that he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Joe Nathan throws this pitch beautifully. In the scorebook, it’ll be listed as a backwards K – *yawn*. A TV guy might say, “a curveball in there for a called strike,” – fine, but still rather blah. But a creative radio announcer might say, “he fires – got him looking…wow!…that ball just rolled off the table and buckled his knees.” Isn’t that better?
I imagine that baseball’s long tradition of being broadcast on the radio is responsible for such wonderful, colorful vernacular. The announcers had to come up with creative ways to describe what was going on. And good announcers created some great jargon.
One thing I wish I knew: Why is it called a strike when the hitter doesn’t strike the ball?
