Let\u2019s welcome baseball season with this item by our late veteran copy editor and word nerd Tom Stern.<\/p>\n
Baseball\u2019s back. I realize a lot of people don\u2019t care. To them, sports fans are knuckle draggers who probably also read comic books while chewing gum with their mouths open.<\/p>\n
But baseball isn\u2019t called \u201cthe grand old game\u201d for nothing; it\u2019s been a staple of American popular culture since the 19th century. Renowned authors from Ring Lardner to Bernard Malamud to John Updike have sung its praises.<\/p>\n
But now let\u2019s talk about Jay Hanna \u201cDizzy\u201d Dean\u2014because not many people do anymore. The Hall of Fame pitcher from the Deep South would have been 109 years old this past January. \u201cOl\u2019 Diz\u201d was a tall, rangy right-hander who was discovered on a Texas sandlot. During the Great Depression, an era of fearsome sluggers and high-scoring games, Dean dominated with an unhittable fastball and unshakable self-confidence. Of his cockiness he once said, \u201cIt ain\u2019t braggin\u2019 if you can back it up.\u201d<\/p>\n
From 1933 to \u201936, Dean put together four spectacular seasons. He won 30 games in 1934, a feat that has been accomplished only once since. Diz was beaned in the \u201934 World Series by an infielder\u2019s throw while sliding into second base. A newspaper headline the next day said, \u201cX-ray of Dean\u2019s Head Shows Nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
He went on to become a popular radio and TV sportscaster who visited mayhem upon the language to the delight\u2014sometimes outrage\u2014of his listeners.<\/p>\n
The St. Louis Board of Education tried to yank Diz off the air. His response: \u201cLet the teachers teach English and I will teach baseball. There is a lot of people in the United States who say \u2018isn\u2019t,\u2019 and they ain\u2019t eating.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dean\u2019s calculated simplemindedness led to on-air pronouncements such as: \u201cHe nonchalantly walks back to the dugout in disgust\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t fail to miss tomorrow\u2019s game.\u201d Both sentences are variations on his clueless-rube routine: In the first one, he uses \u201cnonchalantly\u201d in place of \u201cslowly\u201d (the logical choice). Since both can mean \u201cunhurriedly,\u201d he figures they must be interchangeable. In the second, he makes us all dizzy trying to navigate three negatives (\u201cdon\u2019t,\u201d \u201cfail,\u201d \u201cmiss\u201d)\u2014whereupon we realize he just told us to miss tomorrow\u2019s game!<\/p>\n
One of Diz\u2019s most infamous butcheries was, \u201cHe slud into third.\u201d Dean vehemently defended \u201cslud\u201d over \u201cslid,\u201d insisting the latter \u201cjust ain\u2019t natural\u2026\u2018Slud\u2019 is something more than \u2018slid.\u2019 It means sliding with great effort.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his prime, Diz once said, \u201cI know who\u2019s the best pitcher I ever see and it\u2019s old Satchel Paige, that big, lanky colored boy.\u201d And this: \u201cIf Satchel and I were pitching on the same team, we would clinch the pennant by July fourth and go fishing until World Series time.\u201d Dean made these statements a decade before African-Americans integrated major-league baseball in 1947. Reading those two quotes, I was heartened by the generosity of spirit peeking out from behind Dean\u2019s shroud of buffoonery.<\/p>\n
Maybe Ol\u2019 Diz knew the score in more ways than one. Later in life he said, \u201cI ain\u2019t what I used to be, but who the hell is?\u201d Could that there Shakespeare fella have said it any better?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let\u2019s welcome baseball season with this item by our late veteran copy editor and word nerd Tom Stern. Baseball\u2019s back. I realize a lot of people don\u2019t care. To them, sports fans are knuckle draggers who probably also read comic books while chewing gum with their mouths open. But baseball isn\u2019t called \u201cthe grand old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12,25,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-definitions","category-effective-writing","category-humor","category-verbs"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3094"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}