Baseball Cheese

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Paul McGreal calling.

Well, hello, Paul. Where are you calling us from?

I’m calling from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Paul. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Thank you.

So my son and I were watching the College World Series a little bit back, which is hosted here in Omaha.

And the announcers at some point started referring to fastballs as cheese, saying that the pitcher was throwing cheese.

And when we talked about it, we remembered that we’d actually heard that same word being used in a movie, Bull Durham, and being used in the same way.

And so we’re wondering where that came from because we talked about it.

We said we knew we’d heard that, but we never really knew what the origin of it was.

So that’s our question.

So in the World Series held there in Omaha, was it the College World Series?

Yep, College World Series, exactly.

Were they referring just to fastballs or any other type of pitches?

From the context, it sounded like it was fastballs.

Okay. And in Bull Durham, was it also fastballs?

Yeah. And we took a look at something online and we saw some people referring to, and we heard this too in the show from the announcers, like hard cheese or high cheese.

And it seemed like at least as we were observing it, each time they’re referring to the fastball. Exactly.

That sounds about right. The classic work of baseball terms to look this stuff up in is Paul Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary. I had the good fortune to make small contributions to that book some years ago.

And Paul has done a really good job of mustering a lot of resources to take these terms back as far as he can.

And he’s got this term in there, and he talks about it probably being related to the expression, the big cheese.

Because there is a word that is roughly pronounced as cheese in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi that roughly means, how should I put this?

Thing, item, thing. And it migrated into British English as the best thing of its kind in the early 1800s.

And that’s how it stuck in English and kind of lay there as a slang term for a long time and showed up in a variety of different ways.

And here we have it today is leftover as the big cheese.

And then in baseball as the cheese. As early as about 110 years ago, you can find it in sports columns in U.S. Newspapers.

Oh, wow. Where they, yeah, they talk about it being the cheese.

But what’s interesting in the early use is they often talk about it being pitchers, not just throwing fastballs, but trying to get away with something, like trying to pitch to the outside of the box because they know that a particular umpire is less likely to call a strike or another umpire might call a strike for that same exact pitch.

So it’s not just fastballs, but fastballs with clever pitching.

One quote I see from a 1923 newspaper is, the cheese pitcher is the lad who is always working in the corners and trying to kid the umps out of giving him the edge.

It’s really interesting.

There’s a little bit of gradual transition on that term.

So that’s what Paul Dixon believes, and I think Paul is right on this, that the cheese in baseball ultimately goes back through hundreds of years to this term borrowed from Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi, meaning thing, and it arrived in English as the big thing or the main thing, the best thing.

Oh, okay.

And so is it saying something about the pitcher themselves being big cheese or something like that for being able to throw it?

Well, I think what happened was it kind of became conflated with stuff because stuff is used often in the same way, right?

They talk about a pitcher’s stuff.

Although with stuff, it can be neutral or negative.

He hasn’t got the stuff. He’s got the stuff.

Or what’s his stuff like, right? When they talk about his stuff, they’re talking about the quality of his pitching.

And so would it be almost redundant to say someone has hard cheese or something like that, given that there’s already an implication that it has something special to it?

Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m saying here.

It sounds like it’s moved on.

It sounds like in the beginning, cheese was automatically positive.

And it sounds like over the years, it kind of just became their pitching in general.

So now it does require the adjective or some kind of embellishment to kind of say what kind of cheese it is.

I can really imagine sports writers and announcers embellishing, as you said, Grant, and doing all kinds of variations.

Oh, man, that was stinky cheese.

Paul, thank you so much for calling.

We appreciate it.

Yeah, and thank you for answering the question.

That was great.

It was a lot of fun.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye.

That dictionary again is Paul Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary.

It’s not often that you find a work that is so thorough for a particular field, but this one really does the job.

It’s a great browsing dictionary, even if you’re not into baseball.

And if somebody in your life is into baseball, it’s a fantastic gift.

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