WWW.RIDESIDE.NET

Posted by pamsterdam on 2005-05-12 16:00:15 +0000

Wow, I didn't know anything about Eckersley until I searched for him on Google, and what I found ([url=httP://www.chelmsfordaa.freeserve.co.uk/2000_catch_reports.htm]click & scroll to the bottom of the page[/url]) amazed me. Damn!

Posted by frame609 on 2005-05-12 17:10:40 +0000

"Yeah, you know what, Bill Lee, I'm not going to call you Bill Lee any more. I'm going to call you Sherwin Williams because you're always painting those corners. Throwin' cheese up there, Bill, cheese."

Posted by frame609 on 2005-05-12 18:43:18 +0000

Posted by dawnbixtler on 2005-05-13 05:31:20 +0000

[b]Evk's Vocabulary[/b] Terms Dennis Eckersley coined (verification): walk-off (Some book Mike F. has, perhaps "Complete Baseball") junk (see above) slider (see above) salad ("The Little Red (Sox) Book, 'Curse Reversed' edition" page 145) cheese (see above, same page) More, or verfication?

Posted by frame609 on 2005-05-13 07:23:56 +0000

I'm not sure about the slider. Everything else sounds legit. From 'The Wrong Stuff,' pg. 171 of my paperback: "Eckersley had the world's greatest vernacular. He knew more words that weren't in the dictionary than ones that were. If he threw a 'yakker for your coolu,' it meant you were going to get drilled in the ass with a fastball. 'Cheese for your kitchen' was a fastball up and in. We never went out partying. Instead, we went out to 'get oiled.' The first time we went to a bar together, I asked what he drank. He said 'I oil on eighty weight.' That meant that he drank Jack Daniels. Dennis called me Sherwin Williams, claiming that I was the greatest painter of home plate that had ever lived. I said, 'Well, then why don't you call me Picasso or Renoir?' But no, Sherwin Williams was his idea of a great painter. I guess becase Sherwin made more money than the other two. Eckersley also named me Salad Master, as in 'Bill, you sure do throw a lot of salad up there.' He called himself either the Cheese Master or the Style Master."

Posted by frame609 on 2005-05-13 07:29:29 +0000

This bit by William Safire (!) was in the Houston Chronicle, whole article here: 'The neologism ignored this conservative brushback pitch to earn a place in the baseballese Hall of Fame. I checked with Paul Dickson, editor of The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, whose earliest citation was from the Gannett News Service on July 30, 1988: "In Dennis Eckersley's colorful vocabulary, a walk-off piece is a home run that wins the game and the pitcher walks off the mound." Disconsolately, of course. "The walk-off is a disaster for the pitcher," says Eckersley today, recalling in rue his pitch to Kirk Gibson of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who hit a homer that cost the Oakland Athletics Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. The former pitcher and neologist, who now analyzes the Boston Red Sox for the New England Sports Network, says: "That walk off the mound was brutal. I was devastated." Walk has a history of successful suffixing. A walk-on is a short nonspeaking part for an actor; a walkout is a workers' strike (in Britain, it's a walk-off); a walk-in is spookspeak for an unexpected defector or is a decorator's favorite closet; a walk-up is an apartment accessible only by stairs. Will the meaning of walk-off extend from baseball's "game-ending pitch or hit" to an adjective in the trope-hungry worlds of politics and business: "a career-ending gaffe" or "an event ending all hope of the competition's victory"? Will the sports sense of accepting grim finality in walk-off transfer to the general language, as we have seen in go-to and clutch? Stay tuned (a vestigial metaphor from early radio).'