Tom Harris from Bluebell, Pennsylvania, wonders: In baseball, when a batter is said to take a ball, what exactly does take mean in that context? Batters have been advised to take a ball since the mid-1850s, when rule changes established the modern...
If a baseball is hit really hard, it’s said that the batter powdered it, used to refer to hitting or pitching that’s especially powerful, as if the ball had been fired from a cannon. Similarly, a pitcher with a blistering fastball is...
A baseball yakker is a curveball with a dramatic break, the kind that seems to swerve in defiance of common sense. The slang term apparently comes from yawker, a nickname for the yellowhammer bird, whose swooping flight offers a tidy image for the...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s “coffee cup” quiz requires the addition of the letters M (as in milk) or S (as in sugar) to a word to form another word that fits a clue. For example, if the original word is cap, but what he’s...
Is it a pitched battle or a pitch battle? Originally, a pitched battle was conducted according to traditional rules of warfare, which called for combat in a prearranged time and place. The pitch in this term has to do with positioning, in much the...
Baseball fans know the eeuphus pitch-that arcing lob made famous by Rip Sewell in the 1946 All-Star Game. Before that, the word eephus referred to insider information. Jim Strain in La Mesa, California, even uses it as a verb, as in, “That...
