I grew up in a baseball-saturated world. The radio voices of Red Barber and Connie Desmond were the water in which I and my family and my neighbors swum. It was therefore natural that I early absorbed the vocabulary of baseball and that many words carried baseball meaning to me long before I recognized their alternative and larger existence.
For example, as a boy, I encountered the word "mound." It signified, and signified only, a pitcher's mound — the ten inches of sand and clay from which a pitcher throws a ball. I had no idea that mounds could exist in nature or indeed, could exist anywhere outside of a stadium, there being no mounds on Coney Island Avenue, or, at least, none that I recognized as such.
And then there was the word "pitcher." If someone had said to me, in the 1940s, that "little pitchers had big ears," I might have thought of Preacher Roe, but I would have had no idea that there was such an object as a pitcher for water or other liquid. A pitcher was not jug, ewer, or crock — it was a man standing on a rubber fooling a batter with a slow curve.
Standing on a "rubber?" Yet another word that had a specific baseball meaning, years before it became an eraser or a galosh or a condom.
Similarly, a "streak" was not a gash of color until many years after it was a winning streak or a losing streak or batting streak. A "dugout" was not a canoe, not in my corner of the universe. Nor was a "rally" a political meeting or protest. A rally would never have led to a "strike" — a word which I knew only as one of the allotted three. "Battery?" A team of pitcher and catcher, not something of military or electrical storage interest.
And then there were the plethora, the fountain of lovely words peculiar to baseball, like "shortstop" and "blooper."
Inning was exclusively a baseballism. Not so "outing" which was in my childhood a pitcher's stint on the mound, and which only later became a picnic (or, even later, an involuntary revelation of someone's sexual inclinations).
October 24: How could I fail to include "pennant." When did I learn that a pennant was a kind of triangular flag? Not in the 1940s (or even 50s).
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