When sportswriters painted word pictures

"But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
"And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake ..."

"Casey at the Bat"
Ernest Thayer

Stratton twirled the old horsehide and Dorfman, the batsman, lashed a singleton past the second-sacker, plating two baserunners much to the delight of partisans of the Burlington 9.

Look back in old, old newspapers - or the venerable Sporting News - and that's the kind of paragraph you're likely to find about most any baseball game. It's  how sports reporters wrote things back in the day, a time when they were generally known as "scribes" - that was, of course, when they weren't jeered as those "ink-stained wretches."

Nobody who worked inside a newspaper building ever used that last term to describe a writer - except in jest. No, the term often applied instead was "wordsmith." It was a badge of honor - the thing that separated the true craftsmen from the slobs who simply wrote down stats. Grantland Rice was a wordsmith. Ring Lardner was a wordsmith - so was Red Smith.

And Bill Hunter, the late sports editor of the Times-News was a wordsmith, too - perhaps the last of that breed. Bill, who retired in 1989 after 37 years of chronicling the efforts of local sports heroes and goats, liked to use the word "diamonder" for baseball player or "thinclad" for a track athlete. In Bill's most excellent prose, boxers were "pugilists," wrestlers "matmen," cross country runners "harriers" and tennis players "netters." He liked the words "gridders" for football players or "cagers" for basketball rosters. And if the game involved a women's team, well, that was the "distaff" side.

And some of the younger folks, myself included, would shake our heads.

I mention all of this because of a call managing editor Jay Ashley received the other day about a  headline in sports. It was on a game involving the Burlington Royals and stated "Pulaski plates three runs in final frame to stun Burlington."

The caller questioned the use of "plates" as an active verb for driving a run home. He wanted to know if our sports guys were just making stuff up as they go along - like the way government types turned "landfill" into a verb sometime in the 1990s. Thankfully this has remained limited to densely written 1,000-page reports on waste management and hasn't filtered into regular life. Otherwise we might've heard Tony Soprano discuss "landfilling" Jimmy the Squealer in episode 5.

Anyway, I told Jay later that "plates" isn't a new term at all but a very old one. In fact, Hunter would've loved another thing about that headline: Use of "frame" instead of the more routine "inning."

And that, really, is the point. In the days before radio and then TV, it was the monumental task of sports writers to paint a picture with words and to do so colorfully. That meant eschewing the routine - even if it meant bending the language a smidge here or there. In this world pitchers didn't strike out 13, but hurlers fanned a baker's dozen. A routine play was a "can of corn." Sluggers were known as "heavy hitters" who didn't simply produce home runs but slammed "circuit clouts" or "round-trippers."

Either of the latter sounds much more substantial than the fairly sad "dinger," which is the common term for a home run today. I'm sorry, but "dinger" sounds like something that happened to a car door in the parking lot at Alamance Crossing.

Then again, here are some of those old expressions that might seem out of place these days.

Burlington 9: Sounds like the defendants in a class-action lawsuit.

Twin-killing: Used to note a double-play. Now it means the police should be called immediately.

Twin-bill: Is still a double-header, but finding one is rarer than gasoline at $2 a gallon.

Battery: the combination of the pitcher and catcher can't keep an iPod running now matter how charged up they are.

Busher: Once a way of identifying a rube from the rural leagues; might now be a way of identifying a member of the president's cabinet.

Yes, bending the rules for vocabulary and language had its hits and misses. Still, there was majesty, even a poetry to the language, something left behind today like a discarded wrapper for a "red hot."

But you have to admit those wordsmiths of yore gave it the old college try.

 Madison Taylor is editor of the
Times-News. Contact him by e-mail at
madison_taylor@link.freedom.com or by calling 506-3030