Welcome to the Baseball History Podcast: Featuring This Week in Baseball History, baseball dictionary and a tour of baseball cities. I’m your game announcer Bob Wright.
This is game 83 of the 2007 baseball season
In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 4 week of November.
November 28
1938 Monty Stratton has his right leg amputated as a result of a hunting accident in Greenville, Texas. The White Sox hurler’s attempted comeback is chronicled in the 1949 movie, The Stratton Story.
Monty Franklin Pierce Stratton, nicknamed “Gander”, was born May 21, 1912 in Celeste.
Stratton played five years with the Chicago White Sox, from 1934 through 1938, compiling a career 36-23 won/loss record with 196 strikeouts and a 3.71 Earned Run Average.
Relying primarily on a trick pitch called the “Gander,” Stratton posted 15-5 and 15-9 marks for the White Sox in 1937-38 before his major league career was tragically ended at age 26.
A 6-foot-5-inch righthander, Stratton made his debut with the White Sox on June 2, 1934. He became a starter in 1937, winning 15 games with a 2.40 Earned Run Average and five shutouts, and made the American League All-Star squad. The following season, he also won 15 and completed 17 of his 22 starts.
While he was hunting rabbits near Greenville, Texas in November 1938, his pistol accidentally discharged, sending a bullet into his right knee, severing the femoral artery. The leg was amputated the next day.
In 1939 White Sox management sponsored a charity game in Comiskey Park between the Cubs and the White Sox, with the proceeds of about $28,000 going to Stratton.
In a touching, courageous display, Stratton took the mound to demonstrate that he could still pitch, though he was unable to transfer his weight effectively to the artificial leg.
Equipped with a wooden leg, Stratton worked with the White Sox the next two years as a coach and batting practice pitcher. When World War II started, he tried to enlist but was rejected. Then, he organized a semipro baseball team at Greenville, Texas, and constantly practiced coordination on the field.
In 1946, Stratton stunned the baseball world when he pitched again in the minors. His return to baseball was rough sledding because other teams persistently bunted balls out of his reach, but Stratton finally was able to make a successful comeback winning 18 games with Class C Sherman in the East Texas League.
His comeback attempt was the subject of the 1949 film The Stratton Story, which starred Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson.
MontyStratton died in Greenville, Texas, on September 29, 1982, at the age of 70.
In this inning we’ll open up the Baseball Dictionary
Under the letter: P
fan
1. To strike out a batter; to be put out on strikes; to whiff.
2. To swing and miss. Edward J. Nichols collected several constructions based on this meaning including, “fan the air,” “fan the climate,” “fan ether,” and “fan ozone.”
1st Use. 1884. “In Chicago a man who strikes out is said to have ‘fanned the air with his crutch’” (Sporting Life, May 28; Barry Popik).
3. A strikeout.
4. An enthusiastic follower of the game of baseball; a devotee.
5. Any spectator at a baseball game. 1st Use. 1889. ”Their work on the diamond is a revelation to local ‘fans’” (Breeder and Sportsman, Dec. 7; Peter Tamony). Also: “Kansas City baseball fans are glad they’re through with Dave Rowe as a ball club manager” (Kansas City Star & Times, Mar. 26; Peter Tamony). In his studies of The World (New York), Gerald Cohen found the first use on July 12, 1890: ’”Give us more batting in professional games’ has been the cry of ‘fans’ for years.” Cohen added: ”This attestation of fan(s) is the only unambiguous one I have noticed in the 1887-1890 columns of The World and significantly, it was not written by a New York sports-writer but is reprinted from another city’s newspaper. In New York City, the only word for ‘fan’ at that time was ‘crank.’”
Etymology.
While it is commonly assumed and quite often stated that the term is a back formation or clipping of “fanatic,” other evidence has been presented. William Henry Nugent (American Mercury, Mar. 1929) shows how many common sports terms used in North America are not Americanisms but rather much older transplants from the British Isles. Nugent traces several terms back to the writings of Pierce Egan, whom he calls “the father of newspaper sports slang.” Egan, who published many books and articles on sports in the 1820s, used much of the “flash and cant” of the boxing ring and racetrack in his account of events, while others writing on the same subjects left them out. This was not just the slang of the sportsman but, as Nugent points out, “words that he had picked up from the speech of vagabonds, jail birds, bartenders, soldiers and actors.” Among others, Nugent traced these terms to Egan’s era and his writings: ”palooka” (for a fifth-rate boxer, from a pure Gaelic word); “ham” (for a poor performer, from a Cockney abbreviation of “amateur” to “am,” which was pronounced “h’am”); and “Chinaman’s chance” (which has nothing to do with Asiatics, but came from a light-hitting boxer of the 1820s named Tom Spring who was likely to break during a long fight—a “china man” meaning a fragile individual, one made out of porcelain). (Other terms with a familiar ring that Nugent found in Egan’s dictionary: “to kid,” “to fake,” “to crab,” “to sting,” “to pony up,” “sucker,” “lame duck,” “faker,” “lucky break,” “pink of condition,” “racket,” and “scab”).
Nugent’s evidence on “fan” comes in part from a lexicon that Egan compiled in 1823, and that was published in the third edition of a book first issued in 1785 by Francis Grose, titled Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue as Revised and Corrected by Pierce Egan. The book contains the following entry:
“The Fancy: one of the fancy is a sporting character that is either attached to pigeons, dog-fighting, boxing, etc. Also, any particular article universally admired for its beauty; or which the owners set particular store by, is termed a fancy article, as a fancy clout, a favorite handkerchief, etc; also, a woman, who is the particular favourite of any man, is termed his fancy woman and vice versa.”
Nugent concludes: ”The ‘fancy’ was long a class name in England and America for followers of boxing. Baseball borrowed it and shortened it to ‘the fance,’ ‘fans,’ and ‘fan.’”
An even earlier use of “fancy” can, in fact, be found in Egan’s Boxiana (1818): ”The various gradations of the fancy hither resort to discuss matters incidental to pugilism.” The term was firmly established and, for example, shows up in J. S. Farmer &: W. E. Henley’s monumental Slang and its Analogues (published in several volumes between 1890 and 1904) where it is defined as: ”The fraternity of pugilists: prize-fighting being once regarded as THE FANCY par excellence. Hence by implication people who cultivate a special hobby or taste.” Farmer & Henley also point to “fancy-bloke,” a sporting man, as a variation.
Despite all of this evidence, the word “fan” is still regularly asserted to be a clipped form of “fanatic.” According to Gerald Secor Couzens (A Baseball Album, 1980), the supposed clipper of the word was Timothy P. “Ted” Sullivan, manager and scout in the early 1880s. Others claim it was clipped by Chris Von der Ahe, owner of the St. Louis Browns in the 1880s, who supposedly had trouble pronouncing the word “fanatic” with his thick German accent.
Peter Tamony did much research on the term and sided with the Sullivan theory, which he spelled out in a letter to Jim Brosnan (Dec. 9, 1963). The crucial paragraph: ”A much better claim to origination is made by… Sullivan, one of the real founders of the modern game, in his book, Humorous Stories of the Ball Field: A Complete History of the Game and Its Exponents (1903). Sullivan writes that Charles Comiskey called an enthusiast who visited the clubhouse in St. Louis a ‘fanatic’ and that he [Sullivan] clipped the word to ‘fan.’ He sets the date as 1883: he was then building the St. Louis team which was later to be taken over by Comiskey to win the league championship four times, and the world championship in 1885-1886; Von der Ahe was owner of the Club.”
While these are the two major theories, there are several lesser ones as well. Occasionally, one runs into a restatement of the claim made by Connie Mack that “fan” was first created to describe spectators who fanned themselves to keep cool. Peter Morris fans the embers of this theory: ”It certainly doesn’t prove anything, but I found a very suggestive note from 1879 indicating that score-cards now had handles attached so they could be used as fans. The avid fans would have been the ones who purchased scorecards, so their association with the word ‘fans’ would make sense.”
However, the final word may in fact be at hand. Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen (Comments on Etymology, Oct. 1996) have concluded: ”It is already recognized that ‘fan’ probably derives from ‘fanatic’ and is attested at least by 1889.” Here is their overview as it appeared in the article, quoted directly:
“1) Sports Fan’ very probably arose in St. Louis, ca. 1883, and its origin most likely involves baseball maven Ted Sullivan. In a January 18, 1896 account in The Sporting News Sullivan credits Chris Von der Ahe with coining the term in conversation with him, and Sullivan immediately picked up the term and spread it (‘The expression was a hit with me. Comiskey and the players took it up, and then the newspapers’). In 1898 Sullivan claimed sole credit for originating the term, but there seems no reason to remove credence from the earlier version involving both Von der Ahe and Sullivan.
“2) Barry Popik has spotted two attestations from 1887—two years earlier than the previously noticed first attestation—and, most importantly, with the first one in a St. Louis publication (The Sporting News). From Missouri, sports ‘fan’ spread first to Philadelphia, and the second 1887 quote appears in a Philadelphia publication (Sporting Life).
“3) The third attestation thus far noticed … is from March 26, 1889 in the Kansas City Star & Times, a Missouri publication. This attestation, together with the first 1887 one, help point to Missouri as the birthplace of sports ‘fan.’
“4) The Missouri newspapers from 1883-1887 should now be zeroed in on as the most promising source of additional information on the term.
“5) ‘Fan,’ of course, won out over the previously standard term, ‘crank,’ with acceptance coming first in the Midwest and Philadelphia, only slowly in New York.
“6) The emergence of ‘fan’ in 1889 outside of St. Louis was probably aided by the presence of the St. Louis team in the 1887 and 1888 baseball championships.”
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TWIBH- Monty
Stratton
Dictionary- Fan
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