Made In America - Bill Bryson [180]
Teams endlessly formed and reformed. Many faded away. Others evolved new identities – sometimes a series of new identities. The Chicago Cubs began life in 1876 as the White Stockings (the name was later appropriated by a rival cross-town team) and between 1887 and 1905 went by a variety of official and unofficial nicknames – the Colts, Black Stockings, Orphans, Cowboys, Rough Riders, Recruits, Panamas, Zephyrs and Nationals – before finally settling down as the Cubs in 1905. A Brooklyn team began calling itself the Bridegrooms after four of its players were married in the same summer, but eventually that name metamorphosed into Dodgers – or, more specifically, Trolley Dodgers. The name referred not to the players, but to the intrepid fans who had to dodge across a series of trolley lines to reach the ballpark safely. The Pittsburgh Alleghenys became the more alliterative if not geographically apposite Pirates. The Boston Beaneaters became the Boston Braves. The Boston Red Stockings were known alternatively as the Pilgrims or Somersets before they returned to their roots as the Red Sox.
The first World Championship Series began in 1884 and was being shortened to World Series by 1889. It was a ludicrously inflated title. Not only was the series not global, it wasn’t even representative of the United States. In 1903 there was no team in the major leagues south of Washington, DC, or west of St Louis – a pattern that would remain unchanged until the 1950s, when the rapid rise of air travel prompted a western exodus.31
During its long adolescence in the nineteenth century, baseball generated a vast vocabulary. Among the terms that are still current: walk for a base on balls and goose egg for a zero (1866), double play (1867), bullpen (1877), bleachers (1882), raincheck (1884), southpaw (1885), charley horse (1888), fan in the sense of supporter (1890s), double-header (1896), and to play ball in the sense of to co-operate (1901). But this is only the barest sampling. An exhaustive list would run to several pages. For hit alone well over a hundred terms have been recorded – Texas Leaguer, squib, nubber, banjo, stinker, humpie, drooper, and so on.32
Only sometimes do we know the derivation of these terms. Southpaw has been attributed to Charles Seymour of the Chicago Times, because pitchers at the city’s old West Side ballpark faced west, and thus a left-hander would stand with his throwing arm on his south side. Bleachers has been credited to another Chicago sports-writer, who applied it to those unfortunates who had to sit in an uncovered portion of grandstand and thus were ‘bleached’ by the sun.33 Mencken traces charley horse to a player named Charley Esper of the Baltimore Orioles, who ‘walked like a lame horse’, but Flexner points out that the term was in use six years before Esper started playing.34 Banjo hit, dating from 1925, was coined by the appealingly named Snooks Dowd of the Jersey City Giants, and evidently alludes to the plinking banjo-like sound made by a poorly hit ball. A raincheck was – indeed, still is – another name for a ticket stub. If the game was rained out in the first five innings, the customer could gain free admission to any later match by presenting his raincheck. Hence, the use of the term in the general sense of a deferred get-together.
Other terms are much less certain. Bullpen, for the warm-up area where spare pitchers sit, is often said to have arisen because that is where ads for Bull Durham tobacco were placed. But the story owes more to folk mythology than to any documentary evidence. The bullpen is at least as likely to be so called because of its similarity to the place where bulls are kept. At all events, the first reference to it, in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1877, is not to an area where pitchers were confined, but to a place where fans were herded. Not until 1910 did it come to signify a warm-up area for pitchers. Fans in the sense of enthusiasts is presumed to be a shortening of fanatics, but