by Bill Bryson
But in its details the game that Cartwright and his immediate successors played was replete with differences. For one thing, fielders could put out opponents by catching the ball on the first bounce as well as on the fly, or by hitting them with the ball as they ran (an option that no doubt brought fielders the most pleasure if not the most outs). They wouldn’t wear protective gloves until the 1890s. Before that they caught balls barehanded or sometimes in their hats. The pitcher stood much closer to the batter than now, threw with an underhand delivery, and was required to keep offering pitches until the batter (an Americanism of 1824) found a pitch he liked. Until as late as 1887 he had to put the pitch where the batter instructed him to.28
Batters were at first also known as strikers, and after 1856 as batsmen. The catcher – sometimes called a catcher-out – stood up to fifty feet behind home plate and would remain cautiously out of range of foul tips until the development of the catcher’s mask in the 1890s. The umpire, a term first noted in a baseball context in 1856, also stood (or often sat) safely out of the way along the first base line. In those days the umpire’s judgement was trusted even less than now. Important matches also had a referee, whose job was simply to judge the umpire. (Umpire, incidentally, is one of those many words in which an initial n became attached, like a charged particle, to the preceding indefinite article. In Middle English, one was ‘a noumpere’, just as an apron was at first ‘a napron’.)
Uniforms were strikingly different, too. Cartwright’s Knickerbocker Club, for example, wore uniforms of white shirts, blue trousers and straw boaters, making them look more like the lounging aesthetes in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe than gutsy, knockabout athletes. In fact, they often were more like aesthetes than athletes. The early teams were intended as exclusive fraternal organizations for the upper crust, which is why to this day we call them clubs. Often the games were largely incidental to the social gathering afterwards. Then two things happened: competition between clubs grew more prickly and intense, and the game spread to the masses, where it became evident that manual labourers often enjoyed certain advantages in terms of strength and endurance over stockbrokers and junior executives. At first, working men played in their own leagues – working men’s matches on Boston Common often began at 5 a.m. so as not to interfere with the players’ working day – but before long the gentlemen’s teams began quietly recruiting them as paid ringers. Baseball began to lose its wholesome glow as words like hippodroming (throwing a game for a bribe) and revolving (jumping teams to secure better pay) entered the parlance of the game.
In 1859, when the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed (the national in the title was a trifle ambitious since all the clubs were from greater New York), it insisted on amateurism and gentlemanly behaviour. It got neither. As early as 1860, the Brooklyn Excelsiors were paying a salary to a fastball pitcher named Jim Creighton while the New York Mutuals were charging an admission often cents to their matches and dividing the takings among themselves. Fair play was not always on-hand either. At least one crucial game was decided when the owner of one team had his dog frighten off an outfielder chasing a fly ball.
By 1869 America had its first forthrightly professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who racked up a record of fifty-seven wins, no loses and one tie during the year, and played before crowds of as many as 15,000 people.29
As baseball became increasingly professional, various leagues and alliances formed – including one called, a trifle redundantly, the League Alliance. In 1877 the National Baseball League, the first true major league, was formed.30 The American League followed in 1901, though it had its roots in the old Western League. Among the early professional teams were the Philadelphia Athletics, Troy Haymakers, Brooklyn Atlantics, Detroit Wolverines, Washington Olympics, Hartford Dark Blues and Cleveland Spiders, who in 1899 earned the distinction of having the worst record ever notched up by a professional baseball team: 20-134. New York alone had the Mutuals, Highlanders, Harlems, Gothams, Putnams, and Eagles. Often the place name meant little. Hartford played the 1877 season in Brooklyn. Often, too, if a team was out of a pennant race (so called because the competition was at first literally for a pennant), it didn’t bother to make road trips towards the end of the season. Even when the opponent showed up, it wasn’t always worth the bother. For their last game of the 1881 season, the Troy Haymakers had a paying attendance of just twelve.
Teams endlessly formed and reformed. Many faded away. Others evolved new identities – sometimes a series of new identities. The Chicago Cubs began life in 1876 as the White Stockings (the name was later appropriated by a rival cross-town team) and between 1887 and 1905 went by a variety of official and unofficial nicknames – the Colts, Black Stockings, Orphans, Cowboys, Rough Riders, Recruits, Panamas, Zephyrs and Nationals – before finally settling down as the Cubs in 1905. A Brooklyn team began calling itself the Bridegrooms after four of its players were married in the same summer, but eventually that name metamorphosed into Dodgers – or, more specifically, Trolley Dodgers. The name referred not to the players, but to the intrepid fans who had to dodge across a series of trolley lines to reach the ballpark safely. The Pittsburgh Alleghenys became the more alliterative if not geographically apposite Pirates. The Boston Beaneaters became the Boston Braves. The Boston Red Stockings were known alternatively as the Pilgrims or Somersets before they returned to their roots as the Red Sox.
The first World Championship Series began in 1884 and was being shortened to World Series by 1889. It was a ludicrously inflated title. Not only was the series not global, it wasn’t even representative of the United States. In 1903 there was no team in the major leagues south of Washington, DC, or west of St Louis – a pattern that would remain unchanged until the 1950s, when the rapid rise of air travel prompted a western exodus.31
During its long adolescence in the nineteenth century, baseball generated a vast vocabulary. Among the terms that are still current: walk for a base on balls and goose egg for a zero (1866), double play (1867), bullpen (1877), bleachers (1882), raincheck (1884), southpaw (1885), charley horse (1888), fan in the sense of supporter (1890s), double-header (1896), and to play ball in the sense of to co-operate (1901). But this is only the barest sampling. An exhaustive list would run to several pages. For hit alone well over a hundred terms have been recorded – Texas Leaguer, squib, nubber, banjo, stinker, humpie, drooper, and so on.32
Only sometimes do we know the derivation of these terms. Southpaw has been attributed to Charles Seymour of the Chicago Times, because pitchers at the city’s old West Side ballpark faced west, and thus a left-hander would stand with his throwing arm on his south side. Bleachers has been credited to another Chicago sports-writer, who applied it to those unfortunates who had to sit in an uncovered portion of grandstand and thus were ‘bleached’ by the sun.33 Mencken traces charley horse to a player named Charley Esper of the Baltimore Orioles, who ‘walked like a lame horse’, but Flexner points out that the term was in use six years before Esper started playing.34 Banjo hit, dating from 1925, was coined by the appealingly named Snooks Dowd of the Jersey City Giants, and evidently alludes to the plinking banjo-like sound made by a poorly hit ball. A raincheck was – indeed, still is – another name for a ticket stub. If the game was rained out in the first five innings, the customer could gain free admission to any later match by presenting his raincheck. Hence, the use of the term in the general sense of a deferred get-together.
Other terms are much less certain. Bullpen, for the warm-up area where spare pitchers sit, is often said to have arisen because that is where ads for Bull Durham tobacco were placed. But the story owes more to folk mythology than to any documentary evidence. The bullpen is at least as likely to be so called because of its similarity to the place where bulls are kept. At all events, the first reference to it, in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1877, is not to an area where pitchers were confined, but to a place where fans were herded. Not until 1910 did it come to signify a warm-up area for pitc
hers. Fans in the sense of enthusiasts is presumed to be a shortening of fanatics, but the conclusion is only speculative. Mencken suggests that it may come from fancy, as in to fancy someone’s chances. In the early days, in any case, supporters weren’t called fans but cranks, presumably because they cranked up the home team with their cheering.
Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable – and on the face of it more bewildering – recent neologisms are to dial 8 for a home run and Linda Ronstadt for a good fastball. Dial 8 comes from the practice among hotels of requiring customers to dial 8 for a long-distance line. Linda Ronstadt, more complicatedly, is an allusion to her song ‘Blue Bayou’, the significance of which becomes less puzzling when you reflect that a good fastball ‘blew by you’.
During the long period that baseball was developing from a gentleman’s recreation to the national pastime, another sport was shaping up to challenge its unquestioned preeminence. I refer to the sport that Americans insist on calling football (an odd choice since kicking features only incidentally in its play). As a term football has existed in English since 1486, before America was even known about. In its early days it primarily signified an annual competition in which the inhabitants of neighbouring English villages would try to kick or shove an inflated animal bladder between two distant points. Eventually in a more organized form it evolved into two principal sports, rugby (after the English school of that name where it was first played in 1864) and soccer (from British university slang and current only since 1891).
In its earliest manifestations in America, football wasn’t so much a sport as legalized mayhem, very like the village sport of medieval England. Beginning at Yale in about 1840 it became customary for freshmen to take on upperclassmen in a vast, disorderly shoving match at the epicentre of which was a makeshift ball. After one such match, the New York Post fretted: ‘Boys and young men knocked each other down, tore off each other’s clothing. Eyes were bunged, faces blacked and bloody, and shirts and coats torn to rags.’ Appalled at the injuries and disorder, Yale and Harvard banned the sport in the 1860s.
Students turned their attention away from the annual brawls and took up rugby instead. At first they used the English rules, but gradually they evolved forms of their own – even if they kept much of the terminology, like offside fair catch, halfback and scrimmage (or scrummage, from an English dialect word for a tussle, and now shortened in the rugby world to scrum). Even with the imposition of some sense of order, play remained undisciplined and dangerous. In 1878 Walter Camp, a Yale student who appears to have been regarded as something of a deity by both his peers and mentors (and not without reason; one of the Yale teams he led outscored its opponents 482-2 over the course of one season and 698–0 in another), proposed several rules to bring a greater maturity to the game. The principal ones were that teams be limited to eleven players and that each side be granted three chances – or downs – to advance the ball five yards. This led to the painting of white lines at five-yard intervals, which by 1897 had inspired the term gridiron for a football field.
By about 1880 football and rugby had permanently parted ways in America, and by 1890 Yale was regularly attracting crowds of 40,000 to its football games. Some things had still to change. The centre didn’t snap the ball with his hands, but kicked it back to the quarterback with his foot. Not until 1904 did a touchdown score more than a field goal. The forward pass wasn’t written into the rules until 1906.35 Even then no one really understood its possibilities. When it was used, which was rarely, it involved a quarterback lobbing a short pass to a stationary receiver, who would then turn and run with the ball. Not until 1913 did Gus Dorais, the Notre Dame quarterback, and his team-mate Knute Rockne come up with the idea of hitting a receiver on the run. In doing so, Notre Dame beat Army 35-13 and entered the realms of legend, at least on the sports pages.
Even with Camp’s refinements American football remained violent and dangerous. In 1902 twelve American players died. In 1905 the number rose to seventy-one. To make matters worse, schools began to hire professional players. ‘One man played, under various pseudonyms, at nine schools over a period of thirteen years,’ Page Smith notes.36
Professional football grew up in mining and factory towns in the early 1900s, and the team names tended to reflect local industries, as with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay [Meat] Packers. Professional football was slow to establish itself. As late as 1925 the New York Giants franchise was purchased for just $500. Not until the 1950s and the age of television did professional football attract a huge and devoted following.
Although football has spawned a vast internal vocabulary – T-formation (1931), play-off (1933), handoff and quarterback sneak (early 1940s), to name just four – surprisingly few football terms have entered mainstream English. Among the few: to blindside, cheap shot, game plan, and jock for an athlete (from jockstrap for protective wear, and ultimately from a sixteenth-century English slang term for the penis).37
At the time that football was rising to eminence in colleges, another perennially popular sport was taking shape. In the fall of 1891, a young Canadian named James Naismith had just joined the staff of the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was instructed to devise an indoor game that didn’t involve bodily contact, would not result in damage to the gym, and in which every player had a chance to get in on the action. The game he invented was basketball – or basket ball as it was called until about 1912. Naismith hung peach baskets at either end of the gym and used a soccer ball for play. The first game, in December 1891, involved two teams of nine men each and was not exactly a barn burner. The final score was 1-0.38
As an off-season recreation, basketball took off in a big way, largely because it was so cheap and easy to set up. Within three years, a company was producing balls specifically for the sport and many of the nuances of play had already evolved. For instance, in 1893 came the free throw – or free trial for goal as it was at first called. Five players to a side became standard in 1895, but the names of the positions – centre, two forwards and two guards – weren’t fixed until the 1920s. By 1907, basketball was being called the cage game. Cager, whose continued currency is very largely the result of its convenience to writers of headlines, is first attested in 1922 in a newspaper in Ardmore, Oklahoma.
Oddly, although peach baskets were soon replaced by nets, until 1912 it didn’t occur to anyone to cut a hole in the bottom of them. Until then it was necessary for someone to climb a ladder and retrieve the ball after each score.
Scores remained low for years. During the first National Invitational Tournament at New York in 1934, New York University beat Notre Dame 25-18, and Westminster beat St John’s 37-33. Not until the evolution of the jump shot in the 1930s and hook shot in the 1940s and above all the fast break in the 1950s did the sport take on some real pace.
Many YMCA teams evolved into the first professional teams, notably the Celtics, who were formed in 1915 and came not from Boston but from New York. But financing was always a problem and teams often had to resort to desperate expedients to keep from going under. One early team, to secure sponsorship, called itself the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons. It was named for a Fred Zollner who, as you will have guessed, manufactured pistons. Professional basketball didn’t really get going until the formation in 1949 of the National Basketball Association, created by the merger of two smaller leagues. Like football, professional basketball was essentially a child of television, and, like football, it has had surprisingly little influence on American English. In fact, if you discount occasional figurative applications for a few expressions like slam dunk, air ball and full-court press, it has had none at all.
Of rather more interest linguistically is one of the more ancient of popular pastimes: golf. The game and many of the terms associated with it are of Scottish origin, among them bunker, tee, divot, niblick, duffer, links and golf itself. The word, of uncertain origin though
possibly from the Scottish dialect word gowf, meaning to strike or hit, was first recorded in 1457. Variant spellings suggest that until fairly recent times it was pronounced with the l silent.
Golf came to America surprisingly early. As far back as 1786, just ten years after the Declaration of Independence, Charleston had a place that styled itself a golf club, and Savannah got one in 1795, though there is no evidence that golf was actually ever played at either. Certainly neither had anything remotely describable as a course. In any case, both were defunct by the second decade of the nineteenth century. The first real golf course in North America was that of the Royal Montreal Golf Club, formed in 1873. The first in the United States was the Foxburg Golf Club, in Pennsylvania, founded in 1887.
Though the game is Scottish, many of the terms are American, notably par, which dates from 1898. Par of course signifies the score a good player should make on a given hole. Before par became current the word used was bogey, an old Scottish word for a ghost or spirit. The notion was that each player was scoring against a hypothetical bogey man. However, in 1898, the rubber golf ball was invented and quickly displaced the old gutta-percha balls. (Gutta-percha, for the record, comes from a Malay word meaning ‘strip of cloth’.) Because the new balls travelled further, one less stroke was required on average on each hole. Par therefore came to signify the new notional number of strokes required, and bogey was preserved for the old number of strokes. Gradually as gutta-percha balls disappeared altogether, bogey came simply to mean one stroke over par.39
Birdie, signifying one stroke under par, comes from a nineteenth-century American slang term meaning excellent. Both it and eagle, an Americanism meaning two strokes under par, became common in the 1920s.40 In the same decade golf became associated with two rather odd items of clothing. The first was knickerbockers, a nonce word coined by Washington Irving in 1809 for his Knickerbocker’s History of New York (which wasn’t actually called that; the formal title was History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker). By means that escape rational explanation, the word attached itself first to women’s underwear (which are to this day called knickers almost every- where in the English-speaking world but North America), and then, by a further dazzling flight, to the shortened trousers favoured by golfers in the 1920s, and whose continued existence appears to be the odd and, I would have thought, little encouraged quest of Mr Payne Stewart. Golf knickers further begat another short-lived item of apparel, the plus fours, so called because they were four inches longer than knickers.41