Slang

Baseball writers in times past were often judged by how well they could sling jargon, and that became a type of slang. Ex-ballplayer Ping Bodie, in his later days, liked to ham it up for fans who remembered him, spouting things like "Give me the mace and I'll drive the pumpkin down Whitey Ford's throat." However, this was more literary slang than actual terms used on the field by ballplayers.

Baseball has also been the source of many terms that are used in slang in society outside of baseball. For instance, a person may be described as a "screwball", or someone's ideas may be said to be "way out in left field". While these are a valuable result of the public's interest in baseball, they are not slang used in the game of baseball, but rather slang arising out of fans' interest in baseball.

There is also an "inside" slang, the terms that the ballplayers themselves use. That terminology changes from time to time, and much of it never leaks out to the public. It may vary from team to team. When Mike Krukow first became an announcer, he used the insiders' terms, and fans sometimes could not understand him. His terms were things like "stank-eye", "brain-dead heaver", "meat", and "cement mixer". See Krukow's Vocabulary. However, such terms are also not part of this category because they are not commonly known to fans.

Further Reading

• James Charlton and Sally Cook: How to Speak Baseball: An Illustrated Guide to Ballpark Banter, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA, 2014. ISBN 978-1452126456
• Josh Chetwynd: The Field Guide to Sports Metaphors: A Compendium of Competitive Words and Idioms, Penguin Random House, New York, NY, 2016. ISBN 978-1-60774-811-3
• Paul Dickson: The Dickson Baseball Dictionary: The Revised, Expanded, and Now Definitive Work on the Language of Baseball, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2009 (originally published in 1989). ISBN 978-0393340082
• Chris Landers: "Discover the mysterious origins of some of baseball's most well-known terms", Cut4, mlb.com, July 13, 2017. [1]
• Daniel Rousseau: "Hot Streaks, Screaming Grounders, and War: Conceptual Metaphors in Baseball", in Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Volume 48 Number 2, Fall 2019, pp. 57-62.