It seems that there had been a fight between a Giants fan and a Dodgers fan, which resulted in the Giants partisan getting shot in the stomach. Red Barber, in ''The Catbird Seat,'' says that it was in a bar that sportswriter Tom Meany first picked up the word in 1937 or 1938. The following day, an Oriole player pulled a tendon in his leg and was likened by one of his coaches to ''our ol` Charlie horse.''įrom ''The Baseball Catalog'' by Dan Schlossberg: ''Winners of fights in Brooklyn would invaribaly force the losers to swallow terrible-tasting rhubarb tonic.'' Allen`s book, ''My Basket-ball Bible.'' One day at a local racetrack, several players put money on a horse called Charlie who, leading throughout the race, pulled up lame in the final stretch. This has long been the name for a muscular cramp, especially one in the legs, produced as a result of physical exertion.Ī version of its origin involving the Baltimore Orioles appears in Forrest C. I was sitting in the catbird seat.` I didn`t have to be told the meaning. Frank turned over his hole cards, showed me a pair of aces and won the pot, He said, `Thank you, Red. At the end, when the showdown came, it was between a fellow named Frank Cope and me. I raised on the first bet, and I raised again on every card. Then, he relates, ''During a round of seven-card stud, I decided I was going to force the issue. In his 1968 biography, ''Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat,'' Barber tells the story of how, while playing penny-ante poker with friends, he sat for hours unable to win a hand. Though he denies having created it, he does explain how he once ''bought'' it. The term has long been attributed to Barber. The term often is used to describe a team`s first-place position in the standings. The phrase was popularized by Brooklyn Dodger announcer Red Barber, who would use it, for example, to describe a batter with a count of three balls and no strikes. This term has always signified a position of control or mastery-to be sitting pretty and in control of the situation. In addition, any player hitting a home run in a park with a bull on the fence got a carton containing 72 packs of the tobacco. ![]() As part of its advertising campaign, Bull Durham drew minor- and major-league attention to the 40-foot-long, 25-foot-high signs by offering a $50 reward to any batter who could hit a ball off one. In fact, by 1910, the big bull-shaped signs were on the outfield fence of almost every park in the country. ![]() ''All the ballparks had advertising signs on the outfield fences, and Bull Durham was always near the spot where the relief pitchers warmed up.'' ''It came from Bull Durham tobacco, I was always told,'' Murphy said. ![]() Stengel`s quote was followed by a contrasting opinion from Johnny Murphy, who spent more than 12 years in the bullpen for the Yankees. So he put them in this kind of pen in the outfield to warm up it looked like a place to keep cows or bulls.'' Durso first quoted Casey Stengel, then the manager of the New York Mets: ''We used to have pitchers who could pitch 50 or 60 games a year, and the extra pitchers would just sit around shooting the bull, and no manager wanted all that gabbing on the bench. In the mid-`Ħ0s, an article by Joseph Durso in the New York Times provided two theories. The origin of this term has long been debated in baseball.
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