Kerry Wood Minds His 'Peas' and Q's

If we've picking up on any themes in the almost three months of publishing Batter Chatter, it's that baseball lingo owes a gigantic debt of gratitude to the food world. There is the snow cone catch, the can of corn, the rib-eye steak, and so on. By the way, did someone call Jose Reyes a hot dog?

Yankees announcer Michael Kay added another one to the baseball-foodie portfolio over the weekend. New acquisition Kerry Wood--he of the "nuclear" stuff--had just allowed the past three batters to hit noisy, fearsome shots all over the Stadium. (Though thankfully for Wood, none landed in the short porch.)

Kay said Wood had just had three "peas" hit against him.

Yes, a pea. I'd heard it a few times before; I think it comes from the fact that a particularly hard hit ball, to the human eye, is but a tiny orb flying through the stratosphere.

Back when Tim McCarver used to call the Mets games, he'd use the term "seed" in the same way, as in, Todd Hundley just hit a seed to right-center for a double. The way McCarver said it, it had at least two syllables: seee-eeed.

Oddly, Wikipedia's "Glossary of Baseball" defines "pea" as a fast pitch: A pitched ball thrown at high speed. "Clem can really fling that pea."

On a personal note, we saw a few peas and seeds hit last night at "The Dutch," as the Hudson Valley Renegades stadium is known, as the hometown 'Gades took on the Jammers of Jamestown. Fun for the whole family, and the announcer even made fun of me in front of a crowd of 5,000 or so as I tried to distribute the Family Four Pack of hot dogs and sodas to the clan and missed the opportunity to keep a bouncing beach ball aloft in our section.

To be honest, the beach ball looked like a pea out of the corner of my eye.

[image: yankees.com]