Sports terms that have fallen out of favor in the last 60 years

There was a year or so stretch that I'd use stanza, but then I got tired of the word.

 

Bingle

 

Bingle, huh? ... ... ...

... ... ...

 

I work with people who used it yesterday.

 

Caroms.

 

Some of you might remember Ed Schuyler who covered horse racing and boxing for the AP for 30-some years. After he left the AP he moved back to his hometown which was where I was working my first gig. He used to call me every time he saw someone use plated in a baseball story, or carded a score in a golf story and bitch about why you can't just say knocked in a run or something very basic. For some reason that always hit home with me that I don't think you need to make everything fancy. Just say what the hell happened.

I loved talking writing with Ed just because he comes from a different school of writing than someone my age. Plus, he always had a great stories about Ali, Frazier, Secretariat and such.

 

In the last years of Sporting News running box scores, the boys there would amuse themselves by pumping the little summaries full of old-time phrases like "Rivera fanned Ripken to end the uprising."

I believe there was a time when Baseball America appropriated the old Sporting News names for team notes: Tiger Tales, Wigwam Wisps, Yankee Doodles, etc.

 

Cage/cager has been mentioned on here, and I'd never heard it before. I'm going through some late-1930s articles for a story I'm working on, and I saw it in a few places. Completely clueless.

Reading these old articles is fascinating. Best lede:

"A pair of comely mermaids made it a battle of the fairer sex at the fifth annual LocalU swimming carnival at Local Pool yesterday and came out of the aquatic scrap with a tie."

 

We used to get press releases from a community college that would use that term.

 

Trio of thievery, anyone?

 

How about a pitcher "twirling a gem" or "spinning a shutout?"

And I used to work with a guy who would refer to that night's starting pitcher and the guy who was "shooting the pill."

 

"A pair of comely mermaids" is great.

Speaking of sneaking phrases into copy, there's always the old standby "It was as if an occult hand...."