Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. Guy Lamolinara: Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our "Books and Beyond" program today. I'm Guy Lamolinara and I'm the communications officer for the Center for the Book. And for those of you who don't know about the Center for the Book, we're the reading promotion unit of the Library of Congress, and we've established a state center for the book in every state in the Union and also in all the U.S. territories. In fact, if you're going to the Virgin Islands, we're establishing even as I speak a Center for the Book in the Virgin Islands, and that's where John Cole is right now, our Center's director. [laughter] Also, I want to remind you about the National Book Festival -- this will be our ninth one, coming up on September 26, and it will be on the National Mall, as it always is. And the Center for the Book is the part of the Library that organizes the author's program, and we also oversee the Pavilion of the States. Our "Books and Beyond" programs feature authors who have used the collections of the Library of Congress in their works. Today's speaker, Paul Dickson, really couldn't have come at a better time, talking about baseball and his baseball dictionary. Following the program, Paul will sign copies of his book, and he will also answer questions, and the book is for sale in the back of the room. I just should tell you that this program is being recorded for Web cast, so if you ask a question, you'll automatically be part of that Web cast. Today, Paul is going to discuss the third edition of his monumental work, "The Dickson Baseball Dictionary." Ordinarily, you might not think a dictionary would be a fun thing to read, but that's not the case with Paul's dictionary. If you love baseball, this is really essential for your library, and also it's essential for anybody who loves language, because baseball, really -- the terms in baseball have permeated our language. In "The Washington Post," just this past Thursday, David Broder dedicated a column to Paul's dictionary, calling it a wonderful companion volume for the nights when there are rainouts or the days when our favorite teams are traveling." Today I was just happening to be looking through the book, and I saw a curious expression called "automobile squint." And according to Paul Dickson, that refers to the theory, in the early days of the automobile, that driving would adversely affect a ball player's eye. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of 1910, "Tris Speaker's batting notch has fallen considerably, and the automobile craze is to blame for it." So please join me in welcoming Paul Dickson. [applause] Paul Dickson: Got a little unpacking to do here. [laughs] Thank you very much, and I will talk about the Library in the ninth inning of this little talk today, just before we go to questions. The dictionary pretty much started 25 years ago this spring. In 1984 I was at a ball game at Memorial Stadium with my older son. We were just seeing, you know, a Sunday afternoon game, and he kept saying to me, "You know, Dad, why do they -- why is it this way?" and "Why do they call it a dugout?" and "Why do they say shortstop?" and why is it this and why -- you know, the whole game -- "Why do two teams have different uniforms?" and "What's that called, what are those funny socks with the no toes and no heels called?" He'd always -- he just, you know, as a 9-year old -- I think he was nine then -- would do is they just have -- they just don't stop questioning. And I said, "Look, we'll go to the library Monday morning, and we'll go over to the reference section, and we'll pick out a big fat baseball dictionary, it's probably green in color, and we'll look up all this stuff and find out where all of it came from." And, of course, there was no such book. And I had been publishing books by then, and my son -- my two sons really brought me back to baseball. I had been an avid, avid fan as a kid, and then as other things came along -- girls and mortgages and other things -- I sort of got away from it. But it was when my kids, when I saw the game again through my children's eyes, my two sons' eyes, it was just remarkable, and it got me into baseball writing. I've subsequently done nine "bat and ball" books -- I say "bat and ball" because I've written one book on softball and eight books on baseball, so I can make that claim. So, by starting this thing in '84, I went to a number of publishers, one of whom -- I proposed a book of 3,000 terms, and I worked on a very extensive head list -- always using the Library, by the way, looking at -- this is way before there was Google, or the Internet, or anything else -- but looking at, looking, trying to go through old periodicals, trying to find 19th century terms, et cetera. I came up with the idea that there would be probably about 3,000 terms, which was mind-boggling, because the first publisher I went to, and I proposed a -- I can't remember the word length, but the number of pages -- my first publisher, which was then, that I went to with it, was Doubleday, and in those days -- I got this wonderful rejection letter from the editor. He said, "Look, we own our own plant now, and we're not that good at gluing books together. It's a glue problem, not a content problem." [laughter] So I got my first rejection because of technological reasons beyond my control. But I did go to a reference publisher, Facts on File, and we contracted it. We did a lot of work on it, I brought a lot of people in, including all the people at the Hall of Fame, and people at the Library here, and other places. Put together a small team of about a dozen to 15 helpers who really worked, helped me get that first edition out. The first edition came out in '89. That edition came out with 5,000 entries, which was pretty colossal; it's a big fat book. That book immediately set off almost a storm of people showing up and wanting to help me with the next book. Things from umpires, people who were formerly umpires; people who were studying 19th-century baseball, people who were studying statistics. People who gave vast amounts of time; my editor, who's here today, Skip McAfee had spent literally -- he became my editor at that point, and became -- I would say thousands of hours had been put into the book, and many other people, even in the early days, dozens of dozens, maybe hundreds of hours, in some cases, doing the work. The second edition came out, again, on the "nine" -- '89, then '99. We got up to 7,500, 7,200 -- something like that -- entries, and then, you know, I said, "That's it. It's the definitive work, that's enough, we're done. You know, there's nothing else to be done here." And of course, I was absolutely dead wrong, because then a whole new group of ideas started coming in. There was a mushrooming of statistics, of statistical terminology that came into play at that time, and it was phenomenal. There was more and more stuff. There were more and more Spanish terms creeping into the language of baseball, there were Japanese terms starting to come into baseball. And because of the digitization of documents, there were more people doing 19th and 18th-century research on protoypical or proto-ball, prototypical balls of baseball. So I had scholars, by the time I finished with this edition -- again, it's like a collective snowball going down a hill and picking up more snow -- if you look in the back of the book, you'll find 350 people who were willing to help me with this book. There are probably half a dozen names from the Library, but there are librarians, there are baseball -- just plain old baseball fans, who would read their local paper and mark terms as they came up; other people who listened. But it also includes some of the top names in baseball scholarship. I mentioned Skip; John Thorne, Peter Morris -- there are a number of names, if you look back there and you've done any reading on sort of the scholarly side of baseball, there's a "who's who" back there of those people. And then there are people who threw themselves into this very openly. David Shulman, who's probably one of the most famous of all the linguistic researchers, who died in his 90s a few years ago; David was profiled in "60 Minutes" a couple months before he died, he was major profiled in "The New Yorker." David had also been a code-breaker in World War II, and had written his first article on baseball slang in 1939. So, I put together this team of people that was, even to me, remarkable, and the only metaphor I could come up with to explain it was Tom Sawyer and the fence. You know, when Tom Sawyer is painting the white fence, and everybody is saying, "What are you doing Tom?" And he says "Oh, I'm having the best time of my life painting this fence." And so I sort of picked up people that way, and it's been almost -- if I was in your seat listening to me saying that I recruited 350 people that I didn't have to pay, and who are all mostly pleased as punch to be in the book, including, you know, top lexicographers -- John Morse, Grant Barrett, and I mean, up and down the line, Erin McKean -- these are all people that kicked in, and these are people -- Jesse Sheidlower, the OED people have really helped me a lot on this, I mean, on a personal level. So, it's been remarkable, the fact that just this civilian, this guy, you know, gets all these -- and there are probably more PhDs -- you could probably staff a small university with the PhDs who have helped with this book. [laughter] So I just -- [laughs] I take that all -- and the question, of course, becomes how can there be -- well, the exactly number -- I have to write this down. There's exactly 10,687 definitions in the book -- no, entries; 10,687 entries, 12,358 definitions. The reason is many of these terms have multiple meanings. There are 15 baseball meanings of "hook," 13 meanings of "slot," 11 of "break," "cut" -- there are certain terms like this which in face have specific baseball meanings. And when you start looking at language, you begin to realize that words that vastly different meanings within the context of even one small area. For example, "in" has multiple meanings: the infield is in, "Is this relief pitcher going to go in tonight?" et cetera, et cetera. So "in" starts to be based on more than one meaning within the context of baseball. The one that got me started really thinking this way; the word with the most meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary is "set," which has 137 meanings as a noun and a verb. Everything from "Boolean set," to "set your hair," to a "set" in tennis, but each 137 separate meanings of "set." So it becomes sort of a wonderful sort of drill in looking at language as it exists. The 10,000 is fascinating, because the general rule of thumb is that a person pretty much with a high school education working day-to-day is about 10,000 words, that their daily vocabulary is about -- you know, the one they need to get up in the morning to get to work, at home, do whatever they have to do, is about 10,000 words. So when you realize, this is just 10,000 words for baseball, that's pretty extraordinary. And the question is: how come? How come baseball has worked like this? How come it has taken on this sort of aura? I mean, you couldn't do -- I mean, this book is 4.2 pounds. [laughter] You know, it's a mess, and we had to cut it at the end. There's 635,000 words, individual words, and you know, it's a massive thing. And again, it's been 25 years in the works. I often pinch myself and I say, "Why is this? Why is this not true of other things? Why is this true of baseball in particular?" I think one of the reasons was the way baseball developed and the importance of baseball with the development of newspapers in America. Baseball and newspapers were meant for each other, and in the early days, when you had telegraph and no other means of communicating between cities, the box score of a baseball game could be sent from one coast to the other overnight so the morning paper would have the box score from that game, because it was very easy to transmit those numbers, and they were based on a formula. So you had this very early business with that. The other thing you had very early was a certain intense interest in putting your best writers on baseball, and this went right into this century, that you would pick the guys with the best sort of use of metaphor, the best use of colorful language, because baseball has since needed variation in order to really become interesting to read about. That whole business -- and of course, at the same time there was a huge movement, which came out of the University of Chicago around 1920, when there was a "pure English" movement in this country, and there were long editorials. Some newspapers tried to ban baseball slang from the sports sections. The idea that it was going to somehow poison the ability of young people to communicate, because they were reading these sports sections that were using all this slang, and using words like "slugger," you know, and "the brakes," and these highly slang-y terms. So it was sort of like mathematicians opposing the box scores because it would give the kids a bad idea of what math is really like. It was insane. [laughter] And it was also the liberals -- it was "The Nation" magazine got aboard this thing, University of Chicago saying "You've got to stop all this baseball slang, we'll ruin our children." [laughter] And of course, that goes all the way through into the famous business with Dizzy Dean using the word "ain't," in the depths of the Depression he's chastised on the radio by somebody who was -- Bergen Evans or somebody -- who was a user of perfect English, and said that he should use "ain't" on the radio, and Dizzy said, "A lot of people who ain't saying ain't, ain't making a living." [laughter] And I think the other big influence was the broadcasters. I mean, the early days of radio, there was nothing like it. You had these big-city teams bringing in these Southerners, who were just tripping over their own metaphors. And you know, you've got Red Smith, and Mel Allen, and Arch MacDonald, and all these phrases -- Red Barber, I said Red Smith, who was also a great writer, but Red Barber -- and Barber brought in all of these sort of Southern-isms into Brooklyn. And he would talk about, you know, "being in the catbird seat," and the bases being "FOBs -- full of Brooklyns," and Arch Macdonald would talk about "ducks on the pond." And this carried through, and it still carries through today. And many places in this country, the baseball on the radio is vastly more colorful than baseball on television, because you know -- you have in your mind, you know exactly what the dimensions are out there. So everything else becomes metaphoric, and everything else sort of becomes colorful, and everything -- you're filling time, but you're also -- there's a certain poetry to it. So baseball was vastly expanded by the broadcasters, and again, almost every city in the country. "Well, I grew up in..." -- you name a city. "I grew up in St. Louis." "Oh, I remember so-and-so, that was the great announcer." And even Harry Kalas who died two days ago was one of these guys, was a broadcaster that everybody just loved. And so that's another reason for all of this. The other thing that's amazing is the ability of baseball to create new terminology. I was just -- in the new edition, I just picked a couple things that I just loved that were in the new edition. One of my favorites is "peacocking," and peacocking is a sort of a manifestation that players, starting with Ricky Henderson and some others who do it, when they go to the plate they start peacocking with their jerseys, they pull them out like this. And for some reason, somebody picked up the term, created the term "peacocking" for this, when they go like this. And I'm sure it has something to do with ventilation, or superstition or something else, but it's just a wonderful term. And another one I love is "top-stepper," which is usually a relief pitcher, but a pitcher who makes his manger or his pitching coach so nervous that he stands on the top step of the dugout to watch him. [laughter] And there's another one, a nice one is "loogy," which is a lefty one-out guy, meaning a left-handed reliever who comes in for one out. And the one we have a lot of fun with is "Bugs Bunny change-up," and that came in a couple years ago, and it basically -- what it is, it's a ball that appears to be a fast ball, but just as it gets into the sort of outer extreme of the base of the wheelhouse, where the batter will swing, it stops just momentarily -- appears to stop momentarily, you know, for an infinitesimal fraction of a second -- and then continues in a bit slower. And it has -- it's an illusion, et cetera, but certain pitchers were -- they'd say, "He was throwing the Bugs Bunny change-up." And it took a lot of work, and really work I did with William Safire, we actually -- he put me on it, and we got working on it, and Safire -- and we came up with a 1946 Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs is playing the Gashouse Gorillas, it's a "Looney Tunes" cartoon, and Bugs throws this one pitch, and these monstrous guys can't hit it, because it stops, and their timing is thrown off. So he strikes out the side with this one pitch, so hence Bugs Bunny change-up. And you know, again, there are a lot of others, some of which, again, are more humorous than anything else. Tug McGraw -- who I interviewed for the second edition, before he passed away -- McGraw had these wonderful names for every pitch in the business. He had a Jameson, which was neat and straight, it was a fastball. [laughter] And he was the one who came up with the Linda Ronstadt fastball -- Linda Ronstadt fastball is "Blue Bayou" -- one that "blew by you." [laughter] And then the Peggy Lee fastball, which is "Is That All There Is?" [laughter] But these go back, I mean there are a lot of earlier ones, too. They are playful. I mean, Satchel Paige had his various pitches, and hesitation pitches, and so this goes -- there's a whole history of this sort of playfulness with baseball language. There are also, in doing this book, there are some tremendous surprises, and I'll list a couple of them, one of which is that a lot of these terms, which seem that they were born into baseball, actually came out of something else. I mean, the earliest uses of "grand slam" is in bridge, contract bridge. Rubber game -- when we say, you know, of the three-game series, each team is one-one, and the third game is the rubber game. That's a bridge term. And it came into baseball in the 1860s, but it has always been -- you know, that was a borrowing from bridge. The borrowings were everywhere. I mean, you've got "double-header," going originally to a railroad train with two engines, two locomotives, all the early uses of that. There are ones that -- "hit and run" is another one, sadly, in the news in a baseball context, because of last week's fatality, but "hit and run" was a baseball term before it was a name for a traffic felony, for a vehicular felony. Another one -- I think the most curious one is "jazz," and there's -- we have, I don't know, about three or four columns on the word "jazz" and how all the early uses of "jazz" -- and we brought in some major scholars: Gerald Cohen, who is probably the leading expert on etymology in the country. Gerald came in with this, a lot of the work is his. But all the early uses of "jazz" are in baseball, and they only transmute to music in 1916, but before then, a team is jazzed, the team may have no skill, but it has plenty of jazz. And these were appearing in the papers, you could go through the microfilm and see evidence of the word jazz showing up before it shows up in music. So, that's been really an interesting thing. Another thing I want to just go over a little bit is, there are a couple of terms -- everybody says to me, "What are your favorites? You know, what are the things that you really like?" And I think the three that I get the most fun out of -- one of them is "home run." "Home run" is very interesting, because "home run" starts very early, but it's not -- it starts in the 1850s, but early, early citations -- again, these are things I found here at the library -- all the early citations for "home run" are from horse racing, which is fascinating, because it became -- it was sort of the same as home stretch, but it was sort of an unencumbered, free sort of finishing of the race. And that -- of course, home run is interesting because it has all these other meanings, ranging from -- there's a set of sexual, sort of, accomplishments that ends with a "home run," that teenagers know all about, or they used to know about. [laughter] I assume they do today. All the way to business-like stock, with -- I mean, I've seen a Wall Street dictionary that says, you know, "home run: a stock with an unimaginable capital gain; a home run." And of course, it's [unintelligible]. To some degree, has been supplanted by "slam dunk," but "slam dunk" is something a little bit easier, I think, than a "home run". A "home run" is really a big accomplishment. So I just -- and we've done -- there's a long explanation of the development of the term, and how it evolved over the years. Another one that I just love to talk about is the term "at bat, on deck, in the hold." And we put a lot of research into this, and basically tracked it back to a particular game played in Belfast, Maine in 1889, I think -- yeah, 1889 -- in which the Boston Red Sox were traveling in an exhibition series through New England, and they took on a team called the Belfast Pastimes of Belfast, Maine. And in the process of beating the Pastimes 35 to 1, in this baseball game, the announcer -- in those days, the scorekeeper actually gave the -- they would say, they would announce the next inning, and each team had its own scorekeeper. And the scorekeeper would get up and say, "At bat, next, next." And then the guy who was the scorekeeper for the Pastimes, who was a sailor, according to the original description -- and of course, Belfast is a seagoing town -- and he says, he gets up and he says, "At bat so-and-so, on deck so-and-so, in the hold so-and-so," as in the dugout, still in the hold of his ship. And what happens is the Boston writers who were up there pick this up and take it back, and it starts showing up in the papers, and all of a sudden that becomes the way, that's transmogrified. And again, a lot of this business about doing etymological research -- and I actually was up, I actually went to Belfast, Maine and went digging through the papers, and found recollections of that game by people actually on that field and hearing it for the first time. I couldn't find the actual original game -- I couldn't find the game, but I couldn't find mention, but I found, later, other people who had been at the game saying, "That was the game they first used this term." So that was how all of this was recalled. Another one that's an awful lot of fun is "fungo," which comes in, it's kind of a practice hit, a practice game, you know, hitting the ball up in the air, sort of a catch game. And what's amazing about that is that term comes in in 1867, and there are five really strong camps of lexicographers, etymologists, those people who study language, there are five camps on "fungo." One of them is this extruded thing, which I have a hard time with, which is "fungible," which sort of, like, it's a replacement for the other one. I'm not really cool on that, but I -- I have to give the scholars their room to play. The other is that it comes from fungus, meaning that it was made of a cheaper wood; the "fungo" bat was usually a cheaper bat and it didn't cost as much, and you know, it was just meant for a one-arm flip like this. The other, which is the people at the Dictionary of American Regional English, they have picked as their etymology that it comes from the German word "fangen," "to catch." But there is also a faction in the Dictionary of American Regional English who has talked about the Scottish verb "feng" [spelled phonetically], which is "to pitch," or "to toss." The one I think -- the one that makes the most sense is there's an old cricket term which also follows an old street game, an old Scottish street term, which is "fungo," which is, like, "have a fun go at it." And in cricket, there's a very early term for a practice swing, in which you would say, "Take a fun go" -- in other words, take a bat at it, just for the fun of it. Very interesting use of the word "fung," but you see actually early cricket descriptions, cricket games, which said "The batter took a few fun gos." There's also a Scottish street game that says "One, two, three, go, fun go" that sort of fits into that as well. So, again, it's -- and I'm sure, sometime next week I will get a letter from somebody saying "My grandfather came from Aberdeen, had written this in his book in such and such a year." The other one, I think, that causes the most interest along the way has been "fan". The predominant belief, including the Oxford English Dictionary and others, is that "fan" is a clipped form of "fanatic," and there's some significant backup to that. Another recent -- and again, the book has -- I think we have eight or nine columns on the etymology of the word "fan," so there's a lot of scholarship that went into each of these explanations, I'm giving you the sort of quick and dirty. The other is -- it's sort of a synonym for "windbag," or like a fan, you know, bellowing like a fan, creating a lot of air. And Peter Morris, who delivered a scholarly paper, a very fine paper, believes in this, and has attestations and has his own proof. The one that I find the most interesting is -- and maybe the most romantically inclined to go with -- is "fan" comes from the word "fancy". And this word starts showing up in 1818. There's a British writer named Pierce Egan, all of whose books I have looked at here. They're remarkable, but Pierce Egan was a British journalist who pretty much invented -- two things he invented was: basically sports writing, he was the first beat sports writer in the world. And he was also the first newspaper person to basically use slang as opposed to the King's English. He would write very slangy. He wrote about cockfighting -- he only wrote about the lower sports, he wrote about cockfighting, and he came up with terms like "battle royale" or "the cock of the walk," and he had this wonderful, punchy sort of thing. And he loved to write about prize-fighting, and he virtually invented the language of prize-fighting. He would cover -- he didn't cover fox hunting and the elite sports, he covered bull baiting and pigeon racing and cockfighting and prize-fighting. But Egan, who had this marvelous -- if I was younger, I would do a biography of Pierce Egan, but that's another story -- but he had this group that he derided, a group he called "the fancy". And the fancy were basically noblemen who slummed in London and went to prize-fights and went to cockfights and were sort of dissipated guys. They drank, they were kind in the movies that put this perfumed handkerchief up their sleeve. And he would talk about them derisively, alternately as "the fancy boys," but then it became "the fancy," and then over time, you start to see things showing -- and that goes across the world to America. So it's this sort of elite group of people who are slumming and betting -- they bet heavily, the fancy boys bet heavily -- and that it morphs into "fanc" as slang, "the fancy fanc". And Mencken, H.L. Mencken in "American Language," he basically has a scholar that he found who first brought this up, and Mencken actually goes on the side of the "fanc". So I just thought those, just to go through a couple of my favorite ones. So I think I want to say something about the language -- and I'm aware of the time here, because I don't want to [inaudible]. I think the thing about baseball which is remarkable, and one of the other reasons the language is so rich -- I think one thing is that it transcends eras, that basically the language is -- we are told, for example, every decade someone writes a column in some newspaper and says, "You know, the old terms are gone. We never hear of a 'Texas leaguer' anymore, or a 'dying quail, or we never hear the words 'cup of coffee' for a guy with a small turn in the majors. And we never hear 'can of corn' for a loping fly ball." And of course, as soon as that column comes out, about a week later Vince Scully's on the radio saying "Well, we got a big picket fence out there, and we got a can of corn," and all of this stuff, because it keeps returning itself. It's almost like it turns itself over and go back to this sort of bucolic terminology of, you know, farmboys in baggy pants running around a pasture playing a kid's game. I mean, so that's sort of -- what intrigues me is that stuff really doesn't die, it sort of goes into hibernation and then comes out again when somebody needs a new set of metaphors. Speaking of metaphors, baseball is absolutely a metaphoric circus. We compiled a list here, it's got over 100 -- these are just food terms -- [laughter] -- that have gone into baseball. "Apple knocker," "banana boat," "banana stock," "grapefruit," "grapefruit league." You could go to "cup of coffee," "strawberry," "rasberry," which comes out of baseball; and all of these have some nice piece of etymology to them. But the food terms -- and of course, there's a couple animal terms. Maybe 20 less than the food terms, but it's just a way of sort of showing that the game itself, it just loves metaphors. So something like the aforementioned can of corn for that ball that lopes out of the sky and into the fielder's glove is probably an allusion -- this one that's very difficult to prove, but the folkloric explanation was the old grocer with the hook, you know, the grabber that he would use in the old time grocery store; he'd pull out his apron, and the can of corn would tumble down into the apron. Or "cup of coffee" was -- "so and so just had a cup of coffee with the Royals," you know, just came up at the end of the season for a couple days. Didn't really get into the game, but you know, we brought him up for a cup of coffee. And it's just -- it's such a bucolic sort of non-threatening -- I mean, it sounds like George Carlin, but everybody else has a "locker room" but baseball has a "clubhouse". You know, it's that business. [laughter] I think the other thing that's really interesting about the language is that it has become our language. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of terms that are baseball, and we say every day. "Batting average," "bean," "bench," "benchwarmer," "bonehead," et cetera. We go on and on about, you know, somebody -- if you watch the Sunday morning shows, the talking heads, "Well, this guy's coming in in relief," "He's got to take his turn at the plate," "the Obama administration hasn't gotten to first base on appointments yet," and if you start to deconstruct all that Sunday morning talk, wow, [laughs] there's just baseball all over it. And I tried to come up with sort of a turning point when all this changed, and a lot of it seems to appear -- the beginning of it, that I can find -- there's probably earlier examples, but the first time I really see it used is by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the fireside chats. And Roosevelt would basically -- he knew he was talking -- he knew he was a man of sort of Aristocratic, for lack of a better term, breeding and high education, but he's got a country that's in the dumps, and he's got to -- he doesn't want to talk to the country about caucuses and filibusters and that stuff. He wants to talk to them in a language they can understand, so he can say, "Well, my box score with Congress is not very good," or "This legislation's rounding third and I'm going to need your help to bring it home." And he would use that sort of imagery. And from then on, it was used sporadically by presidents. President Eisenhower is another one. Eisenhower threw in a lot of football -- no golf, but he would throw in a lot of football -- but if you go look through some of Eisenhower's speeches, he talks about it in terms of baseball. And so I -- again, I think that helped -- there was sort of this process by which we began to see baseball in terms of our own lives. It's slow enough, and it's also long enough -- - you know, it's 162 game season. It's not like a football game that's every Sunday, it's like day-in-day-out for the sort of the harvest part of the year, the part where we're planting crops through the time we're harvesting. And so a lot of the way it's done, the batting averages, the fact that baseball finds a way to -- there are two games the same day, or you have two singles in a row; they're "back-to-back singles". That's a baseball term. You don't think of the things that have now -- "the breaks," the breaks of the game, "he got all the breaks." "Game face." These are things we don't think about any more as baseball terms, but that's where they come from. So I'm going to tell you -- there's just two other things, and then we'll go to the questions, if that makes sense. The two other things I want to talk about is I've been doing a lot of radio and things with this book, because it's just been out for less than a month, and everybody says, "Is there going to be a fourth edition?" Well, that would be -- let me see, '89, '99, 2009 -- 2019. And people are already coming through with stuff. Very good stuff is starting to come in again, and people are saying, "Oh, there's that statistic you didn't have in the book." So we're skipping or gearing up for the inevitable, which is, you know, another version, which would mean -- I'm 70 this summer, so I'll be 80 -- or my kids will take it over. One of the things I did -- [laughter] When I started this process, and this is a person confessing to you of an enormous immodesty, and I'll do it anyhow, but one of the things I had in the back of my head when I was many years younger, 25 years ago, I said, "Boy, wouldn't it be cool to create a piece of American reference and that you became, like Roget maybe or Webster, where you would brand this thing." And my first publisher was aghast, when I went to Facts on File. They wanted to call it the "Facts on File Baseball Dictionary." I said, "Not on my watch, you don't." [laughter] So, and my two sons who are very -- one of them just built a Web site for the book called baseballdictionary.com, so they're in Double A right now, getting ready to go into the game. [laughter] I just want to talk about the Library for a second. When I first came to Washington in the late '60s, I was sent down here to cover Gemini and Apollo for NASA, and I was doing a lot of freelance. I started coming to the Library at night. I wasn't married, I was here in town. I just couldn't believe my eyes -- and I'd used the New York Public Library before -- it just, it was unbelievable, and there was nothing I couldn't do here. And I kept -- you know, I hate that when papers, the newspapers will say something like "so and so discovered -- hidden in the stacks of the Library of Congress he found this document." There are people in the Library who are trying to get you to look at the document. [laughter] "I found this obscure document!" Doesn't it make him sound like Marco Polo going into the stacks, or something. [laughter] But the fact is I still find this place magic, and I've used it. I have -- I'll do one more tiny bit of immodesty -- I have five books coming out this year, which is a fluke, because this one I've been working on for 25 years. Here's a book from Johns Hopkins which comes out next month, which I've been working on for six years; but it's just a fluke of time that they all came out together. But every one of those books has basically a major component from this Library. And it's not just the regular going in and putting in the call slip and getting out the book, it's the next level here. I'm working on a biography now, my first biography. I'm doing Bill Veck, who is a very interesting character in the history of baseball. And I found, in the Library -- now, I didn't find it, it was in the catalogue -- but I listened to 305 broadcasts that Bill Veck did for Armed Forces radio in the '50s, and I sat in one of those broadcast booths on the first floor here, and for 2 1/2 days I listened to this guy. And by the end of the 2 1/2 days, I could talk like him, I knew exactly how he said, talked about things. He never said "woman," he always said "the female of the species." He never said -- he never used nicknames. So when he said "Satchel Paige," he didn't say "Satchel Paige," he said "Leroy Paige." I got a key -- I got more understanding of that guy from his recordings, and from what I discovered, what the people in the department told me, that I was the first one to ever ask for them. Because they had to put them on some carrier so I could listen to them on the thing. But the other thing is, in photography, the "Look" magazine collection -- 3 million photographs. And I found extraordinary material on this one man. There is no other place that I know of in the country where you go -- you go through the obvious really quickly. I mean, the databases are cool beyond belief, and they make Google look like nursery school. They've got these phenomenal and very expensive databases, and all that's wonderful. You could probably get a lot of that at a top university library. But what's really remarkable is the extent to which this place holds on to American life, and holds on to it with grace and a tremendous ability to share. I mean, I've tried to use the British museum, and you're just a writer. I'm not -- I don't have an advanced degree or something -- you know, well, then maybe. Here, it doesn't matter. And I think the other thing is, you've got -- I mean, even on things like [unintelligible] "All the newspapers are digitized." Well, if we go with the digitization, which is now the trend, we're going to end up with a very elite view of the world, because if you're -- let's say you're looking at New York City. Now every library in the country has the ProQuest, they have "The New York Times" back to the first issue, they have "The Wall Street Journal" back to the first issue, they have, you know, "The Washington Post" back to the first issue. But who's going to digitize "The Washington Star"? Or "The New York Herald-Tribune"? Or "The New York Daily News"? Or the second, third, fourth and fifth papers in all these towns. And a lot of times it was that second paper, with a much more of a blue-collar audience and much more of an attempt to please, and be a little bit anti-establishment in the face of "The New York Times." I remember when I was a kid, when the Salk vaccine -- I grew up in a neighborhood ravaged by polio, and "The New York Herald-Tribune" has this huge second coming headline: "Polio Solved!" You know, I'm going to school screaming and yelling, like, you know, "Polio Solved!" And all my neighbor kids, all the kids in the neighborhood read "The New York Times." And "The New York Times," on page A72: "West Coast researcher believes he may have new clue to polio." [laughter] And that was Jonas Salk. And so, you lived a different life through these other papers. So I think the fact of the matter is -- I mean, that place downstairs where you do the microphone, man, that's just one of the best places in the world. And so I just want to use this time as an opportunity to thank the Library. I've been using it, I've written -- I'll be probably up to 54 books by the end of the year, and I just want to thank the Library for making it possible for me to make a living. And also, a lot of the quality that goes into these things comes right out of this building or the ones across the street. [applause] So, questions? Yes, sir. Male Speaker: Could you tell us where the term "K" comes from for a strikeout? Paul Dickson: That goes back to Henry Chadwick and his original description. And again, Dave Kelly and I found the original -- there are lot of -- Chadwick, who was the guy that put together a lot of the early rules, he was a British journalist who came to this country. And there are many theories about "K," but the one that wins the day is that Chadwick, in creating his early scoring system, picked the letter "K" as the dominant sound in "strike". And it was annotation, which he explains later; he put it in first, and then somebody asked him later how did it come about. And he said he didn't want to use "S" or "SO" because it looked too much like "single" or something, but "K" was just this perfect thing. And he also -- it was suggested by somebody at the time that he also like the sort of the symmetry of the three strokes for the K. When you're writing it in the book, you have three strikes; you know, three pen marks. Yes, sir. Male Speaker: Speaking of scoring systems, why do you suppose to this day Major League Baseball doesn't even have a standard scorecard or standard scoring system? Paul Dickson: Because, as Thomas Boswell -- I did a book on keeping score, so as Thomas Boswell once said, "It's an inalienable right of every American to keep his own scoring system." [laughter and applause] And I found, when I did research on the scoring book -- again, next door -- one of the most curious things that I found was a scorebook invented by L.L. Bean for the television age. And apparently L.L. Bean -- one day, Ted Williams comes into L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine and word goes up to the old man that Ted Williams is in the lobby, or downstairs buying fishing rods. And Bean comes downstairs and says, "That scoring system is no good, it doesn't work for T.V." So with Ted Williams advice, Bean creates his own scoring system. It was totally worthless, but -- [laughter] So I think -- the other thing, a lot of the stuff is Chadwick. A lot of the numbering of the places around the bases. But I found that a lot of -- I've been in broadcast booths where I would have thought that this would be all digitized, and there are still guys who basically do the hand scorecard and they make -- they have all different kinds of notations. You know, notations for spectacular catches -- and the beauty of the scorekeeping is it's totally indigenous to baseball. And I remember sitting with a friend of mine who was much older, and he knew I was working on a book on scorekeeping, and he said, "Wait here," and he went -- he was about five houses away -- and he came back with a scorecard from the last time the New York Giants played the Brooklyn Dodgers in New York; the last time they both played. And he said, "I was at that game." And he gets up there, and it was almost like watching, like, a rabbi, or -- [laughter] -- the Jewish praying, or whatever. And he's almost like -- here he's going, he's rocking back and forth, and he's going -- and he was calling the game, from this piece of cheap pulp paper that he had done so many years ago. It was amazing. And he called the whole game. Holy cow. "What, he got a single? How did he get a single?" You know, but -- Male Speaker: I score old games and I've yet to find the perfect scorecard to use. Paul Dickson: But that's, like, the holy grail. [laughter] That's sort of the fun of it. Male Speaker: What's the best baseball word that's been invented in this century? Paul Dickson: Oh... [laughter] Man. The best baseball word? Male Speaker: Secret sauce. Paul Dickson: Secret sauce. [laughter] Which is a statistical term. Tell us. Male Speaker: [inaudible] Paul Dickson: Okay. We're going to read you -- this wasn't advertised as a reading. We're going to do it from the book. [laughter] You know, people say to me, "Oh, you say on page 687..." [laughter] Okay: Secret Sauce: the three ingredients that most reliably predict post-season success -- a high strikeout rate [spelled phonetically] for the pitching staff, adjusted for a team's league and ballpark; quality of defense such as fielding units above average in a reliable closure, as measured by wins expected above replacement -- -- this is one of these terms that has come in with the advent of sabermetrics and almost a maniacal interest in statistics. My favorite one of the new statistical terms is a term called PECOTA, which reminds you of Billy Pecota the in-fielder. And PECOTA is all-caps, and it stands for "Player Empirical Comparison Needless to say, I had great help on the statistical terms in this book by a leading statistician from the University of Delaware, who is the big expert on baseball statistics, because I can't -- things like -- terms like that I couldn't have written myself, I need somebody else to sort of say what exactly was there. Because it's almost like higher math, or physics or something, the way that's going. Male Speaker: Have you heard the new one, AGI? This kid McCarthy just wrote a book about playing single-A ball in Ogden, Utah, and AGI is a statistic that pitchers use. It's an "Almost Got in the Game." [laughter] Paul Dickson: That's like Phil Rizzuto's "WW" in his scorecard. He'd say, "WW: Wasn't Watching." [laughter] Yes, sir. Male Speaker: What's the derivation of the "golden sombrero"? Paul Dickson: It comes from a hat trick, and it may in fact be a Hispanic influence on the game, because -- one of the things -- I wrote another book, which is called "The Unwritten Rules of Baseball," and I talked to a lot of people about some of the unwritten rules about ethnicity; the unwritten rule that kept African-Americans out of the game, and also there was a rule that -- pretty much unwritten rule -- that you couldn't have too many Latin players on your team, because they tended to be too happy-go-lucky and such. And of course, that was -- it was a cultural difference. Often an Anglo player would come back with his head down and say, "I just struck out at the end of the world." A Latin guy would say, "Next time I'm going to knock it out of here," you know, with his head up. So I think terms like "golden sombrero" came out of that sort of, "Hey, you know, I struck out three times, I struck out four times." And the "platinum sombrero" is five times, but it shows up -- [laughter] Male Speaker: You alluded to the connection between baseball language and newspaper, and with the demise of so many papers, and the decline in baseball coverage in newspapers, should we be worried about the language in baseball? Paul Dickson: I'm not sure. I mean, they'll probably find a new -- try to find a new outlet. I have a lot -- I'm on Facebook with a lot of baseball writers, and they're filing outside the games, now. Tyler Kempner, the "New York Times" guy who covers the Yankees, is on Facebook writing about stuff in spring training that doesn't show up in "The New York Times." So, the new media is -- it at once is a curse to the written word, but it's also, in another sense, it gives it a new flexibility. So I'm not terribly depressed. But little things bother me, like the fact that "The Washington Post" decides not to cover the Orioles anymore, you know, which is a little bit parochial. [laughter] Male Speaker: Along those same lines, do you think that the bred of announcers today, within the last 20 years, is significantly less colorful than the old [inaudible]. Paul Dickson: I think that's true to a point, but Vin Scully is still working; you got John Miller, who's wonderful. There are some people outside the big cities who are doing a wonderful job; some of the double-A, triple-A announcers are doing some really interesting work. I keep hearing little bits from friends who say, "You've got to hear this guy now," you know, somewhere out in Oregon or somewhere. I think the tradition is still there. I think what's been bled out is television is bleeding a lot of it out, because the demands of so many ads, the pace of the game changes with the advertising, and -- but I think the urge is still there. Male Speaker: Who do you think of as the best color man in baseball? Paul Dickson: You mean historically? Male Speaker: Yeah. Paul Dickson: Oof, I don't know. I grew up in New York, you know, so I'd be hearing Red Barber and Mel Allen, I loved those guys. I think it's where you grew up. And you couldn't beat those two -- Male Speaker: [inaudible] Paul Dickson: Of the announcers, I think John Miller's the best. And he hasn't been sullied, he hasn't been dampened by television, which often happens. [applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us, at loc.gov. [end transcript]