Without question, baseball has a language all its own

Many people today fail to realize that baseball has a language all its own. The interloping of other sports onto the American scene seems to have blurred a portion of the terminology. But things are always as they are, and I plan to pen here for the first time in 34 years of writing this column, an informative correction.

There is way too much blurring of the lines between sports these days. Each sport should have its own individual quirks and activities that make it what it is. Take the wave. I really have seen few things stupider than the wave at a baseball game. It was invented for football and should remain there.

Yet everybody, or at least a lot of people, are so unimaginitive they are unable to think up their own things to do and have to purloin from others. Even baseball has its own cannibals. At Wrigley Field, the Bleacher Bums began to throw opponents' home run balls back on the field. Now, others have picked it up, thus diminishing something that belonged on Chicago's North Side.

But this is about terminology. Let me explain the language business.

Let's say there are a couple guys sitting around when one of them casts his eyes upon an attractive young lady and decides, "I think I'll hit on her."

The next day, one fellow asks the other how he did and he replys, "I struck out." Here you have two baseball terms, hits and strike outs, being used possibly by two people who with no previous knowledge of the game.

How many times during the course of the football season might you hear a sportscaster excitedly describing a touchdown pass as a home run?

If someone asks another a question with an unexpected answer he might say, "He threw me a curve."

When people get down to serious business negotiating it is often referred to as hardball.

If someone does something lowdown to another it might be said he pulled a bush league trick.

That should be enough examples for anyone to realize just how much impact the language of baseball has had over the peculiar American language, which is not English as spoken in England for certain.

But as baseball has had its impact on Americans, other sports have had an effect on baseball.

That's where we get down to those blurred lines as other sports have fought and clawed their way to a point where their words are often used to describe baseball matters.

Here are three examples I have seen a lot of recently and feel that is my duty as a lover of things traditional to, as it were, correct them.

First, there is the the term groupies we often hear today.

These are teenage girls who spend summers chasing their baseball heroes. It is nothing new. But groupies follow rock stars, not baseball players. Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham was not a groupie. She was a Baseball Annie. Over the years as girls chased the teams across the country, terms popped up, among them were Baseball Sadies and Chicago Shirleys. But the term, as applied to baseball is Baseball Annies.

Secondly, we come to leagues as opposed to conferences. Baseball teams never play in conferences, just and only leagues. Both the NFL and the NBA, and quite possibly for all I know, the NHL, use conferences within leagues while college teams play in conferences. It's only been since 1969 in professional baseball, which was born in 1876, that divisions were introduced to a sport steeped in tradition.

Third we come to the word manager, which in baseball has a totally different connotation than in other sports, which are run by head coaches. The baseball totem goes from general manager to field manager to coach.

In baseball you have: third-base coaches, first-base coaches, bullpen coaches, hitting coaches, pitching coaches, bench coaches and goodness knows what else. But in baseball there is no head coach. Coaching and managing are totally different jobs in the grand old game.

It is the difference that makes baseball the unique sport. Without that difference, baseball drops back into the pack. The games of football and basketball are coached by head coaches and their assistants. Baseball is guided by a manager. In fact, while a lot of people are unaware of it today, it is an insult to call a baseball manager coach, because in baseball, coaches are subordinate to managers.

Sadly, as we move near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, people just don't seem to have the love of tradition they once did, or they'd pay more attention to the game's terminology. You know which game, the only one not governed by a clock.