Pounding the Pavement For A Suspect

We all know what a slam dunk is away from the hardwood--a challenge so easy as to not really even be a challenge anymore. Get a craft beer-loving client to go to lunch at the new joint that features 812 microbrews? Slam dunk! Ask for a raise after pouring the overserved boss's boss into a cab at the holiday party? Slam dunk!

Not as well known--the slam dunk has a baseball equivalent. While the slam dunk elicits a very vertical image--Jordan soaring through the air like an Eagle, or little Spud Webb telling gravity to shove its perpetual come-back-to-earth nature up its arse, the baseball counterpart hugs the ground.

In fact, it is a ground ball, and you've probably heard it in this context if you dabble in law enforcement.

Wrote the NY Times about a homicide case on a famous street in broad daylight that remains unsolved:

“You got ground balls and you got mysteries,” said John Cornicello, who used to command homicide detectives in Brooklyn. “A ground ball is husband stabs wife and maybe stays on the scene. This is a mystery.”

Perhaps the gumshoes need a good sinker specialist to get that sorely needed ground ball. 

Keith 'Soldiers' On After Dopey Descrip

To have Keith Hernandez on your baseball telecast is to take the good (funny, no filter observations from a sharp mind) with the bad (dopey comments that could've used a filter).

Keith stepped in some of it during the recent Subway Series, when Mets second-sacker Daniel Murphy had his bat sawed off by a filthy pitch in on the hands.

"Well, that is a dead soldier right there, folks, laying in that infield dirt," said Keith.

The problem was, it was Memorial Day, when baseball announcers are wise to avoid metaphors that mention war-dead. 

An SNY rep called it "an honest mistake" and said, "We will address the matter with Keith," reports the NY Daily News.


Keith's misspeak even reached the Daily Mail over in England, which reported "outrage" over Hernandez's characterization of Murph's splintered timber, though the article fails to mention any actual outrage.

The Daily News article says "dead soldier" is an established baseball term (it is not to be confused with "wounded soldier," which refers to half-finished beers that have been abandoned), but I'm not seeing a single usage of it in that context on the interwebs--outside of reports of Hernandez's Memorial Day blunder.
It does not appear in Wikipedia's Baseball Glossary or MLB's pretty lame Baseball Lingo page. 

Keith will not let it happen again--until, of course, he inserts his foot in his mouth once again. 

James Carville Stays Abreast of Current Events

A creative entry to the offbeat (and, relatively off-color) baseball lexicon came from a most unlikely source, as political strategist James Carville tells Rolling Stone magazine that President Obama extending his predecessor's tax cuts for the not terribly wealthy is a "titty high fastball."

If I'm understanding the Bayou boy correctly, Carville is saying that doing so was, to mix sports metaphors, a slam dunk for our president. A no-brainer. In baseball terms, a cookie or a meatball.

"This is what they call in baseball a 'titty high fastball,'" says Carville. "You better swing at it."

I'm not exactly sure who the "they" that Carville refers to are--it's hardly a mainstream term. Googling "titty high fastball" yields but three results.

One site, SethSaith.blogspot.com, recounts Ernie Banks speaking to a room full of kids.
Hopefully nobody's parents got too uptight when Banks humorously recalled Satchel Paige asking him if he could hit a "titty high fastball," especially as far more exuberantly than when discussing his diamond exploits, Ernie urged the youngsters to "learn something new every day."

Another, a chat room on South Carolina sports, features a discussion on fastballs that come in north of the chest, but south of the eyes.

It's all about eye level. The funny thing is that a titty high fastball is meat but a chin or eye high fastball is unhittable, unless you're Ron Gant.

[image: nytimes]

Making Sure the Melk Stays Cool

Melky Cabrera had a helluva All-Star Game, as befits a man having a helluva season.
The man once dubbed "Leche" by then-teammate Derek Jeter, Cabrera was labeled a "six-tool player" by another former teammate, Alex Rodriguez.
Any fan of the game knows what a five-tool player is: a guy who hits for power, average, can run, can field and can throw with the best of them.
A six-tool player, said Rodriguez, according to the All-Star announcers, can play in New York.
Alas, Melky didn't fare quite so well in New York. His best season in Gotham, far as batting average is concerned, saw him hit a respectable .280 in 2006. Best RBI year? Seventy three rib-eye steaks a year later.
Jump ahead to his time in Kansas City last year, and San Francisco this year, where he is on pace to obliterate those marks.
A-Rod could've expanded the geography of the sixth tool; if you can succeed in New York, conventional wisdom says you can succeed in Boston, and vice versa.
Says Paul Konerko of new mate Kevin Youkilis in today's NY Times:

 “I think we knew that eventually, whether it took a couple of weeks, he would do his thing because he’s a good player and he’s always been really good. He’s won the World Series, and if you can play in Boston and play in New York, you can play anywhere.” 
Youk would probably be considered a five-tool player: hits for power and average, fields and throws well, and can succeed in Boston.
Speed? Not so much.       

[image: BleacherReport.com]

Surely You Own a Shirsey

Posey Shirsey

I was checking out the Met game on the ESPN.com Gamecast last week, and trying in vain not to follow the real-time Twitter feed on the right of the screen.
One tweeter mentioned a guy sitting in front of him, wearing a Carlos Beltran "shirsey."
So I Googled "shirsey," a nice diversion from another Met loss.
"Shirsey" is, in fact, a real thing, with its own website selling, yes, shirseys.
You've seen shirseys before. Perhaps you even own a few. It is the team jersey-styled t-shirt--a shirt-jersey, of course, for those who perhaps can't quite afford a full-on replica jersey.

The @Shirseys Twitter feed even acknowledges its budget-minded focus.
"When you've only got $20 to spend on your favorite player," reads its tagline.
The beauty of the shirsey is, while it is styled after the baseball jersey, you can grab a shirsey bearing the name and number of your favorite hockey guy, hoops dude, or footballer.
Shirseys.com founder Jake Fehling explains what the heck a shirsey is on his site:
I asked myself the same question two years ago when my cousin-in-law (if that’s even a thing) Alex from South Jersey told me how excited he was with his new Phillies Chase Utley shirsey. All I could offer back on the other end of the phone was dumb-founded silence. Did he just say an “Utley purse key”? No, that makes even less sense. An “Utley hershey?” Mmmmmm, but no.
An Utley shirsey.
I finally responded with an “ohh, yeah…hell yeah, nice, man,” but it wasn’t until about five minutes into the call that I finally did the math:
T-shirt + jersey = shirsey. I dig it.
Over the next several months I heard the word used 3-4 more times. I had gone nearly 30 years of never coming across “shirsey” — calling the ones I owned at the time: “t-shirt jerseys” — and now within three months I’ve got family members and buddies from different parts of the country throwing around the word as if it was commonplace. Maybe these people are all onto something, I thought…

Slumping Batter May Have a 'Screw' Loose

You hear it fairly frequently--So-and-So batter is really hitting the ball on the screws.
In Sports Illustrated's season preview, Prince Fielder's "bat speed looks good this spring," noted a scout. "He's hitting the ball on the screws."
Last spring, a hard luck Derek Jeter was finding his hard hit balls beelining straight to someone's glove.
Wrote ESPN NY:
With two out and a runner on first in the seventh inning of a relatively close game, Jeter again hit the ball on the screws only to see it disappear into the glove of first baseman Miguel Cabrera.
Even at the high school level, they are screwing around on the diamond. Noted Huntington (SC) High school coach Brandon Cassell a few weeks ago:

"Really, two and a half or three weeks ago, we just started hitting the ball on the screws."
It is akin to, in more modern baseball parlance, "squaring up on the ball."
I just popped out to the garage to check out a baseball bat. I didn't find any screws.
While you can, of course, throw a screwball (though few pitchers do anymore), there are no screws in the ball either.
So why do we say "hitting the ball on the screws"?
Wikipedia's fairly useful baseball glossary offers what may well be a good explanation of the term's origins:
The phrase apparently derives from golf, referring to "a well executed shot. In the good ol' days, when woods were made of wood, club makers fitted a plastic insert into the club face as a safeguard against premature wear. These inserts were fastened to the club with screws. When a golfer would hit a good shot, he would say, 'I hit it on the screws'."^[8]

Project 'Runway', Starring R.A. Dickey

R.A. Dickey's autobiography Wherever I Wind Up elicited some emotion, some chuckles, and some good, fresh terms for the ol' language-of-baseball blog.

In one part where Dickey is ironing out aspects of his not yet famous knuckleball with a mentor, Dickey reveals some names for parts of the ball that I never heard before.


"He asks me to show him my grip, and I hold the ball up with the fingernail of my index and middle fingers bitting into the 'runway'--the part of the ball where the seams come closest together," Dickey writes.

"He suggests I move my nails to just underneath, the 'horseshoe.'"

("runway" to the left, "horseshoe" to the right)