In Their Own Words

Baseball is sublime, whether in the person of Lou Gehrig or Frenchy Bordagaray.  We would all probably like to face death as Gehrig did, by telling a packed Yankee Stadium, “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”   We would all probably like to have the joie de vivre of Bordagaray.    As an outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Bordagaray came to spring training in 1936 sporting a mustache and goatee.  Manager Casey Stengel—yes, him—put up with it for a while before deciding, “If anyone’s going to be a clown on this club, it’s going to be me.”  Another time, Bordagaray spit at an umpire, which earned him a $500 fine and 60-day suspension.  Bordagaray thought, “The penalty was a bit more than I expectorated.”

Unlike baseball, football is merely ridiculous, as when Bears’ coach Marc Trestman explained why his quarterback went deep on a third-and-one play Sunday against Miami:  “We had a called individual route on the outside with an option vs. bump-and-run to throw the ball up the field.”  Is it even English to the millions of casual fans who watch football on a Sunday afternoon?  Who nods their head in agreement on reading this?  Who remembers?

I just worry sabermetrics will give the national pastime a gridiron accent.  The Sun-Times ran a recent column with this gibber-jargon sentence:  “The Royals led the AL in Rbaser with seven runs, one more than the Indians.”  Somewhere, Lou Gehrig is not pleased, and Frenchy Bordagaray is spitting his disgust.