Talkin' Baseball

Some people worry about coming off as a newbie at baseball games. With the conference tournaments this weekend, the Regionals next weekend, the Super Regionals the following weekend and the College World Series in Omaha in mid-June, this is a great time to see some college baseball. Here are some tips to help you pass as a veteran bleacher bum.

First, get the baseball cap I discussed in my last blog post and wear it a little before you go to a game. Sweat in it if you can (guys only), so it doesn’t look new at the park.

If you’re a girl, wear your hair in a ponytail pulled through the back of your cap. It’s cute beyond all explanation.

Now, you can get away with not saying much at the park, though I have found that real bleacher bums love it when a newbie asks questions. They’re not perturbed; they jump at the chance to look knowledgeable.

Unless, of course, you ask them to explain a balk, which almost no one can do.

So, asking questions and revealing your lack of knowledge is a totally legit way to go and it can work well for you, especially if you’re an attractive female.

If you’re a guy, it might be better to fake it.

If the batter hits a high, fly ball to the outfield and the outfielder takes a step or two and waits for the easy catch, just nonchalantly say, “Can o’ corn.” I read that the expression came from shopkeepers who would tilt a can of corn on the top shelf with a stick and catch it in their apron when it fell, but people make up crap like that all the time, so who knows.

Any fan worth his salt yells at the umpire. I was at a game with a friend when the opposing pitcher threw a strike and the umpire called it correctly. My buddy yelled, “Come on, Blue! Wipe off your glasses!”

I looked at my buddy and asked, “What? It was waist high and right over the plate.”

He said, “So?”

His point is, you have to rag on the umpires a lot and it doesn’t matter whether you think he is right or not. If it’s a call against your team, it’s a bad call.

And always, always call him “Blue”, not “umpire” or “ump” and certainly not “ref”.

Many umpires wear black. It doesn’t matter. If you want respect from other fans, berate him as “Blue”.

One of my favorite expressions is “Baltimore chop”. That’s what you call a hit that strikes the ground just in front of home plate and bounces over the infielder’s head. Apparently, the Baltimore Orioles used to do that in the 1890’s on purpose, though if you see one today it was probably a mis-hit ball. 

If you see one, say, “Baltimore chop!”  Knowledgeable fans around you will smile with appreciation for your old-school baseball chops (pun intended).

You can call a home run just about anything you want except a “home run”, which will clearly identify you as a novice. At a minimum, call it a “homer”.

My favorite expressions for home runs are yard ball, dinger, moon shot and tater. Sometimes, you will know as soon as the ball leaves the bat that it will clear the fences. For extra credit, as soon as you know, and before the ball actually clears the fence, say, “that one ain’t coming back”.

All that protective gear the catcher wears is called the “tools of ignorance”. The phrase is attributed to a catcher, so it fits. Instead of saying, “He’s a catcher”, you say, “ He wears the tools of ignorance.”

If the pitcher throws a ball high and inside, close to the batter’s head, it’s called a brush-back, or one of my favorites, “chin music”. A hit that goes over the infielder’s head but not far enough for the outfielder to catch is called a Texas Leaguer, a blooper, or just a “bloop single”.

The pitcher’s mound is called “the hill”, “the bump” or even “the mound”, though never the “pitcher’s mound”. The white rectangle the pitcher touches with one foot is technically “the plate”, though no one calls it that. It’s called the rubber.

Cheese is a fastball and a yakker is a curve, though few people in the park are near enough the action to really distinguish between the two most of the time. You’ll know when the pitcher brings the cheese, and if it’s a big, slow yakker, you may detect that, as well. A batter who is called out on strikes is said to have been “caught looking” because he looked at his third strike instead of swinging at it.

A strikeout is a “K”, because scorekeepers use that letter to record a strikeout. No one knows why, though people have made up several reasons over the years. When a batter strikes out “caught looking”, the “K” is entered backwards in the scorebook, though I know one guy who scores it with a regular “K” and two dots next to it to look like eyes. Get it? Caught looking?

If all else fails and you feel you need to speak, ask, “Who’s on deck?” The next batter waits in the on-deck circle and the batter after him is said to be “in the hole”. If someone answers, just nod as if you knew he was the next batter but wanted to confirm.

This next part is vitally important. If you want to sound like a baseball insider, you have to say these expressions in a confident, knowledgeable way, even if you have no clue what they mean. Especially, if you have no clue what they mean.

It helps to act like you’re talking to yourself by not making eye contact with anyone around you.  I guarantee you that if a batter crushes a pitch and you quietly say, “that one ain’t coming back”, you’ll have them asking you to explain the balk rules.

So, next time the opposing pitcher walks to the bump and brings the cheese and your favorite team’s batter is caught looking because he was guessing yakker, grab your baseball cap, find a curse word appropriate for your surroundings, and scream, “C’mon, Blue, are you blind or what?” Then put your cap back on and shake your head in disgust.

Trust me. No one is going to know you grew up playing soccer.

Last weekend, I posted some Instagram shots of a college baseball game I attended at the University of Kentucky. My sister saw them and, knowing of my addiction for college baseball, asked, “How do you not have a baseball blog?”

I have about a million other things going on in my life, including several blogs, but college baseball is one of my true loves and, besides, if it makes my sister happy I’m all for it.

So, here goes.

My first thought was what to blog about, of course, and with a million baseball blogs already vying for mindshare that should have been a difficult decision. Surprisingly, it was not. I love going to college baseball games, though I occasionally attend minor league games and even a high school game now and then, but I rarely even watch Major League baseball on TV.

I took my two sons to a Yankees-Orioles game in Baltimore in 1997. I paid $300 for three tickets that turned out to be under an upper deck behind home plate. Well back under the concrete upper deck, we could see the ball leave Darryl Strawberry’s bat, but unless it was a grounder (it never was), it immediately disappeared from view. It was like watching TV with a blanket covering the top half of the screen.

Parking cost $50 and I spent an equal amount on souvenirs and concessions. That was the day my enthusiasm for the “Bigs” died.

So, I decided to blog about being a baseball fan, particularly a fan of baseball games whose tickets rarely cost more than about six bucks.

Where does one start a baseball fan blog? At the top, of course—with the baseball cap.

At the age of eight, I began playing baseball in my neighbor’s backyard in the tiny town of Dawson Springs, Kentucky. Every kid in the neighborhood, except me initially (I was the youngest), wore a baseball cap. I began a parental-begging campaign and one day in 1959 my mom gave me money to buy one.

I walked downtown to the clothing store at Main and Water Streets, Haye’s Dry Goods, and marched to the mens department at the back of the store. I told the salesman I wanted a baseball cap. He walked over to a wall covered with large, dark-stained wood drawers and pulled one open near the bottom. Inside were several rows of baseball caps in various sizes—no snapbacks or elastic-banded one-size-fits-all’s—in three colors, red, navy and green. I wanted navy because I was a New York Yankees and Mickey Mantle fan, though caps didn’t come with team logos then, at least not the ones you could buy in Dawson Springs.

The caps had the backs folded inside and the bills perfectly flat so they would stack. Back then you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a cap with a flat bill, though in some circles today they are all the rage. I’ve even seen some of UNC’s players wear flat bills, though it will always look strange to me. In my youth that would have been a self-hung dork sign.

The salesman handed me several sizes to try on until we found one that fit just right. I bought it and headed home. I seem to recall it cost a dollar, though maybe it was less. It was solid navy, made of wool, and had a paperboard bill.

I had seen older kids wear the bill folded in half like a little pup tent and they would sometimes stick the doubled bill flat into the hip pocket of their jeans with the beanie part hanging out. I put a crease down the center of my cap’s bill, pulled it over my crew cut and walked back up Meadows Hill to my neighborhood.

The first person I ran into was Jed Dillingham. I smiled and said, “I got a baseball cap!”

“You broke the bill,” he informed me. “You shouldn’t have done that.” Then I noticed the nice, gentle round curve of Jed’s bill. I had committed a baseball fashion faux pas. I had unknowingly ruined my brand new baseball cap and I was heartbroken.

Fortunately, I got my second cap just a few weeks later from our little league team. The first thing I did was run to Jed and ask him how to shape the bill. I still use his technique.

You can put a rubber band around the bill and let it set for a few days. Some people just keep shaping the bill with their hands until it eventually holds the desired curve. Some roll the bill and stuff it into a coffee mug for a few days.

Jed used none of these techniques. He placed a baseball under the bill of my cap and used a rubber band to shape the bill around the ball and I impatiently let it sit for a few days. I still use this method because it infuses the cap with baseball-y-ness.

Many baseball caps today have plastic in the bills and they are quite difficult to add more curve or to make flatter. Fortunately, I like the shape of most plastic-billed caps.

Major League teams get their caps exclusively from a company called New Era. They still use paperboard in the bills, just like my first baseball cap. Paperboard is less durable but more easily shaped. My first baseball cap was made of wool, as many still are, but most are made of synthetic material now, or cotton.

Who wears baseball caps? Nearly everyone in America, and because we are fashion trendsetters, they’re worn all over the world. Hollywood types have worn them ever since Steven Spielberg showed up on the set of Jaws wearing a cap. Spike Lee wears them. Football players wear them on the sidelines and basketball players wear them to post-game interviews. Hard to find a fisherman wearing anything but a baseball cap, at least east of the Mississippi.

I have a few baseball caps. I wasn't sure how many so I decided to count them for this blog. I display 15 of my favorites atop an armoire in my bedroom. These are my dress caps.

Then I remembered I had stacked the overflow in my closet. I counted 17. So, there are 32 currently in my bedroom, but only because a few months back I culled about a dozen that had seen far better days.

Oh, and by the backdoor I have a hat rack with seven or eight more that I wear fishing or to work in the yard. And, wait, three were in the wash today.

Why, you might well ask, does anyone need 43 baseball caps? I don’t need them, of course, but they’re more than baseball caps. They’re snapshots.

The Redskins cap is from my early days in Washington when the Skins ruled. I have a cap from Infoseek, a former employer and one of the first search engine companies, and I have one from Proxicom, an early dotcom. Raul Fernandez gave me that cap just before his company went public and he was able to become co-owner of the NHL Washington Capitals, the NBA Washington Wizards, and the WNBA Washington Mystics.

Ah, the dotcom era. Those were the days. Every company had a baseball cap with their logo.

I have a few from America Online, where I worked for nearly a decade and even one from AOL Time Warner after the ill-fated merger. One was a souvenir from a trip to the Everglades and I have a couple from Bethany Beach, Delaware, where we used to spend summer vacations when our kids were small. I have a couple of Tar Heel Baseball caps I wear to UNC games.

I have an Atlanta Braves cap I wore when my son played for the Little League Atlanta Braves and I have a Marmot baseball cap made of Gore-Tex that serves as a rain hat. I have a cap with The Headstones logo, a rock band from my high school that is still playing together, and several that were given to me by fly fishing guides. I have several caps from my alma mater.

My favorite, at least for now, is the one I’m wearing in my photo above.

I photographed my caps and added captions in this Tumblr and noticed it’s pretty much my autobiography written in baseball cap logos.

The Double Stack

A frequently asked question about baseball caps is how to clean them. If they’re wool, hand-wash them with Woolite and stuff the beanie with plastic grocery bags to hold its shape, then air-dry them. If they’re cotton or synthetic, throw them in the wash, then air-dry them with the beanie stuffed. I’ve washed dozens of caps this way and never had a problem. If the bill is plastic, it will come through washing unfazed but paperboard bills can lose a bit of curve and may need to be re-formed somewhat after they dry.

There are several ways to wear a baseball cap, though I typically wear them in the “normal” bill-in-front style. I also like the bill-in-back style in certain circumstances, though that used to be more fashionable than it is nowadays. There is the bill-to-the-side fashion preferred by hip-hoppers and if you get two caps as gifts on your 94^th birthday as my father-in-law did last week, you can even go for the two-fer look in the photo, though I don’t expect that style to go viral.

So, basically, you can wear them any way they fit on your head. In fact, there is a baseball tradition known as the “rally cap” for times when you find your favorite baseball team behind in the score. You simply wear the cap in any unusual way you can: inside out, upside down, folded in half, there are no rules.

Rally Caps

It doesn’t matter what you wear to a baseball game as long as you’re wearing a baseball cap. You can wear a business suit and a cap, or a tank top, jorts and a cap (a look also known as a "Full Florida") and you’ll still look like a real fan. At last night’s UNC-Virginia Tech game I counted 58 fans in my section and 27 wore baseball caps. That’s way too few in my opinion.

There are over 200 NCAA Division One baseball teams and more than 240 Division Two teams, meaning there is a good chance you can find a college game nearby. So, go to a baseball game. Be a fan.

But first, buy a baseball cap or two.

Or forty-three.