The Yogi, the Duke, and the Bambino
I did not know what “larrupin'”
meant five minutes ago.
Nicknames, like secret handshakes, have always been a way to
say that you’re part of an exclusive gang. Yet baseball monikers once felt like
a nationwide hug shared between fans and athletes. And everyone was a fan to
some degree. The sports pages may have been the best-written and most accurate
part of the newspaper. You could argue with anyone anywhere about the Yankee
Clipper without worrying that the words “sails” or “DiMaggio” would creep into
the conversation.
In the days of radio play-by-play, glorious baseball
nicknames were woven from situation and alliteration. Often granted by sportswriters
to meritorious rookies, the practice seems to have fallen out of favor;
otherwise we’d be talking about “The Big Syringe” and “The Baltimore Cuckold.”
The golden era of baseball nicknames gave us the Sultan of Swat, the Georgia
Peach, the Big Train, Three-Fingered Brown, Cool Papa, Yogi, Stan the Man,
Dizzy, Daffy, Charlie Hustle, the Bird, Space Man, and the Human Rain Delay.
Often, birth names were lost to common usage — who ever refers to Laurence
Berra?
In the twilight of the nickname era, the best-known handle
of an active player likely belongs to Roger “the Rocket” Clemens, who has been
plying his trade for more than two decades. Though fans will
know the Big Unit (Randy Johnson) and the Big Hurt (Frank Thomas), who have
also been around for eons.
Perhaps we’re simply too sophisticated nowadays to make
sport of our sports. Who is no longer on first, and we have only ourselves to
blame. Apropos of Larrupin’ Lou Gehrig, it means “a
blow, especially one delivered with a lot of force,” which I had intuited as a
child, though adulthood required definition.
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2006.
