Language of game is constantly changing - Brief Article

Baseball Digest, July, 2002 by Ed Graney

CRAZY. TWENTY YEARS IN THE bigs, and Tony Gwynn couldn't figure out what in the world these college baseball players were telling the opposing team's pitcher. Gwynn listened intently, trying to decipher the almost whisper of a chant.

Breeeeeeeeeeathe ... breeeeeeeeeeathe ... breeeeeeeeeeathe ...

"I finally figured it out," says Gwynn. "We had been down, but now we were rallying. The pitcher was getting fight out there. We were starting to hit him pretty hard. Our guys were on him, telling him to breathe. It was pretty funny.

"In one game, a fly dropped in and someone in the Rangers' dugout piped up, `Can't teach that.' I had never heard that one before."

Language is a living thing, and sports jargon is as much habit for some as coffee with cream. In baseball, the ways you might have described a home run as a child--tater, dinger, crushed it, rocket, long ball--might still apply on fields today.

There are just more ways to say it.

And yet no matter the level, baseball jargon is like chat-room rumors. You throw a few hundred sayings out there and see which ones stick.

"Players are more hip today and like to come up with their own stuff," said Gwynn, the former Padre who now shares his wisdom on San Diego State's bench. "(Baseball jargon) has evolved, and yet you still hear a lot of the same things you did as a kid. I always thought I came up with the saying `That's a good piece of hitting.' Now, everyone says it."

Some jargon is passed down like a fraternity's secret handshake, and it often doesn't matter if a particular saying makes sense. As long as it's cool. Example: Many refer to a curveball as a "Hook Johnson." Hook makes sensei Most have no idea what "Johnson" means. A slider is a "slide piece."

Piece?

Someone threw it out there. It stuck.

But there is also a growing trend of younger players who have no use for jargon. Sean Burroughs is the Padres' rookie third baseman who grew up talking more about waves and skate parks than whether a fastball was a "good piece of cheese." Cool to him meant a day at the beach.

"And he's one of the last ones to come from a baseball family, a kid who grew up around the game," said Padres third base coach Tim Flannery. "If he doesn't have a lot of baseball jargon, it's hard to find kids who do. It's a lost language for a lot of them.

"But each year, guys still come to spring training with different things. I'm not sure who sits around inventing it over the winter."

It doesn't stop at merely ways to describe the game, but also how words are offered. Take the Padres last season. Anytime something went right, someone would bark out "That's what I'm talking about!" Seven months later, as the season neared its end, it sounded more like:

"Thatswhatimtalkingabout!"

This year, something good isn't just "That's nice." Rather, it's "That's nuuuuuuice."

Or you could be like Padres second baseman D'Angelo Jimenez, and not know what any of it means.

"You hear stuff every day," said Jimenez, one of the team's Latin players. "I just speak a lot of Spanish, so most of the players don't know what I'm saying, either. But we don't have much (jargon) in the Dominican Republic.

"A home run is called a home run."

Maybe that's the best way to look at this. Maybe the whole baseball language thing isn't really that big a part of the game's tradition.

And maybe it's a beautiful day for baseball and your pitcher is throwing heat. The other team's runner was caught napping and your guys are really seeing the ball well. If your starter can pitch out of this late-inning jam by taking something off his fastball, he could go the distance and earn a decision once your team manufactures some runs. After all, your leadoff hitter might be in a slump and pressing, but he took a good cut the last time up. Three up, three down for the bad guys. Here's the payoff pitch to your cleanup hitter. He really got ahold of that one. He was all over that pitch. He hit that one right on the screws. A towering drive. That one's going, going--gone! A walk-off homer!

See.

What jargon?