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"And he hits a frozen rope over the wall!"A frozen rope? Where the hell did this term come from, anyone know? What is the history behind it? I heard someone on XM the other day use this term to describe a homerun and I thought it was the dumbest term I've ever heard. Homerun, long ball, a bomb, a blast....these terms I am more used to.Then a week or two ago, can't remember the announcer but, he kept referring to homeplate as "the dish." IT'S A PLATE!
I'm assuming you've heard "the dish" and "frozen rope" before. Anyway, think of a frozen rope. Long, straight, hard, and clean. [That's what she said] As for "the dish", the plate and the surrounding area looks like a dish.
I'm assuming you've heard "the dish" and "frozen rope" before. Anyway, think of a frozen rope. Long, straight, hard, and clean. [That's what she said]
can of corn:back in the day corn was on the top shelf in grocery stores (or maybe they just picked corn for the hell of it. substitute beans if you want). to get it down, they pulled it off with a hook and caught it. thus the easy soft catch = can of cornor so somebody told memakes sense though
a long, thin, light bat.
To me, one of the more obscure baseball terms is "Linda Ronstadt" for a fastball (because of her rendition of Blue Bayou, blew by you...). A bit of a stretch, that one. For that matter, why not call it the Roy Orbison?
I always wondered where the term "shortstop" came from.
The origin of the word "shortstop" appears to have been lost in the mists of antiquity, but the absence of the facts has never prevented me from making something up, and the present case is no exception. I have here a Currier & Ives lithograph that purports to depict the first officially recorded baseball game, which occurred on or about June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey, between the Knickerbockers and the New York Nine. Notwithstanding the fact that the Knickerbockers had made up the rules, they lost. Not what you would call a team of destiny.Anyway, the print shows most of the infielders standing more or less on top of their bases, with the shortstop situated on the infield grass, perhaps 20 feet closer to home than his modern counterpart. Other sources confirm that this was the usual practice in the early days.We may further note that the baseballs of yesteryear were fatter and, how shall we say, deader--that strikes me uneuphoniously, but you know what I mean--than they are today, and partook more of the bulbous quality that is commemorated nowadays in such phrases as "heave the old tomato, Jack." Moreover, this was the era before the introduction of the mechanical lawnmower, when infields were savage jungles that captured and ate innocent baseballs, or at least kept them from getting very far.So it is not difficult to suppose that in the infancy of the game, there may have been a need for an infielder who could deal with short-range ground balls expeditiously, before they dribbled to a halt and got lost somewhere--who could "stop them short," you see. Sure you do. Later, of course, when the ball got livelier and the grass was more carefully attended to, the velocity of the average grounder would increase considerably, requiring the shortstop to retreat and join the other infielders in the wide arc that characterizes modern defensive alignment.There are a couple holes in this theory, but I leave it to the inevitable gang of malcontents to point them out.
