Dizzy Dean had a million such errors, not all of which were as intentional as his mangling of such words as “slid” (”He slud into third base”) and “confidently” (“Yogi strides up to the plate very confidentially”). You can’t even print some of his classics.
And during World War II, when you weren’t supposed to report on the weather over the radio, Diz got into trouble for saying things like, “That ain’t sweat runnin’ down the pitcher’s face,” and, “I can’t tell you why there’s a game delay, but stick your head out the window and you’ll figure it out.” But as Diz said about his liberties with the language, “A lot of people who ain’t sayin’ ‘ain’t,’ ain’t eatin’.”
Jerry Coleman was perhaps baseball announcing’s master of the malaprop, with things like, “Winfield goes back, back, back — he hits his head on the wall! It’s rolling toward the infield!”
Curt Gowdy’s forte was redundancy. He once said that Los Angeles Dodgers baseball player Wes Parker “was originally born in Chicago.” And during a football telecast, Gowdy once said, “At halftime, we’re going to see a performance by some canine dogs.”
Bill Currie, the famed “Mouth of the South,” once broadcast a minor league baseball game for a team whose manager was also a relief pitcher. The manager took the mound, got into trouble and took himself out in favor of another hurler — whereupon Currie reported with a straight face that the manager “has just relieved himself on the mound.”
Somebody made a book of “found poetry” out of Yankees broadcaster Phil Rizzuto’s bon mots — things like, “The moon over Yankee Stadium is beautiful tonight. I wish I were in Australia, so I could see the other side of it.”
Famed wordsmith Yogi Berra never broadcast a game, but he has had stints on radio and television reviewing restaurants (“Nobody goes there. It’s too crowded”) and movies. He once saw “The Hunter,” a film starring Steve McQueen, who had just passed away. “He musta made the movie before he died,” Berra told his audience.
The best policy seems to have been that of Jack Buck and Carl Erskine, on a short-lived “Saturday Game of the Week” on ABC-TV. They took the position that people tuned in to watch the game, and they limited their talk to a few flashes of what could be called “color” and notes on the game situation and personnel (the names of the pitcher and batter, the inning, the count and the score) — not much chance for malapropisms there. The games were a pleasure to watch, but the lack of talk never caught on. Fans still wanted radio broadcasting.
The best of the radio baseball announcers may have been Waite Hoyt, who had the curious habit of reporting in the past tense (“The pitcher wound up and threw, and the batter — hit a home run over the left-field fence”) on the theory that, by the time the listener heard about an event, it had already happened.
Hoyt, a former pitcher himself, also always said that a pitch properly hits “the outside edge,” not “the outside corner.”
Hoyt’s real time to shine, though, was during rain delays, which is when most announcers get into trouble because they have to talk. Hoyt’s trove of true and apocryphal baseball stories, though, often made rain delays more exciting than the games themselves. Hoyt’s gone now, so is Buck, and Erskine isn’t announcing. I’m still waiting for a return of their styles, though.
