Folks who weren't there can hardly appreciate how thoroughly the nation and neighborhood into which I was born was baseball-saturated. In the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of the fabled Dodgers, baseball was Brooklyn and Brooklyn was the world -- of this there was, nor could be, any doubt.
Baseball was the all-encompassing medium though which we learned about success and failure, defeat and resiliency, exhilaration and sadness, and ultimately of the knowledge of good and evil.
Not only morality, but language itself. It's an unimpeachable fact that my early vocabulary was solidly baseball-based. It took years and sometimes decades before I discovered that many baseball words also carried an off-the-diamond significance.
Readers may scoff at this claim to the linguistic priority of baseball -- because they can't imagine or can't believe how central pitching and catching was to our experience. So "let's go to the tape."
Take, for instance, the word "pennant." During my salad years, "pennant" was a common everyday word that meant only "league championship." If you finished first in your league, you "won the pennant." I had not the least glimmer of an idea that a "pennant" was also physical object -- a flag, it turned out, usually triangular and usually nautical. To me, a pennant was immaterial and metaphorical. When Russ Hodges famously (to those of us of a certain age) screamed, in 1951, "the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant," there was no reason for twelve-year-old me to suspect that the word had an extra-baseball existence. (Nor did I know that "league" meant anything but National or American, major or minor.)
Another such word is "battery," which to me and to my cohort of scruffy schoolyard friends meant nothing more than the duo of pitcher and catcher. "Today's battery is Newcombe and Campanella"; "they're facing the 'brother battery' of Mort and Walker Cooper." But later it came to pass that the word battery was known to the world beyond Ebbets as a source of electric power-- in those days lead-acid and now lithium. And that, in addition, "battery" had violent associations -- as in "assault and battery" -- or its military signification as an assemblage of cannons. (The word "batter" had already leapt its baseball perimeter. Thanks to my mother, I was early familiar with the tasty mixture that could be baked into cookies or bread). And "bat" was the old hickory or ash, not a flying mammal.
There are many other baseball words that migrated away from their first home. A "rubber" was a 4" wide strip of something -- was it really made of rubber?-- that lay on the mound just 60 feet and 6 inches from home plate. Later, a rubber became an eraser and then the material from which automobile tires are made and then, much much later, a condom. A "mound," of course, was first and foremost a pitcher's mound, not a geographical feature. A "dugout" was where players gathered when they weren't on the field; later it became a kind of canoe. "Stuff" -- some days a pitcher had his good stuff, but some days his sinker just didn't drop. A "stance" was a batter's pose in the box; some batters had an open stance and some a closed. "Clutch" did not denote holding tight to something or other; it meant only a "clutch hit". A "blast" was not a bomb going off; it was long four-bagger. The "count" was not degree a of knighthood; it was the state of balls and strikes on the batter. The next batter would wait on a metaphorical "deck" long before a deck became a pack of cards or an exposed porch. A "blooper" was a "Texas leaguer"; only later did it become a flawed outtake. Strike! Three strikes and you're out. Later, a labor movement. And many more.
"Fair" and "foul" indicated where a batted ball fell to the earth in relation to the first or third base lines. Macbeth's "So foul and fair a day I have not seen" was many years into the future.
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