Our newest podcast: A strikeout is a core part of the game, one to inspire a slew of colorful terms and descriptive phrases, as related by Jesse Goldberg-Strassler in the debut Tales from the Baseball Thesaurus podcast.
We’ve expanded our podcast offerings to include both video and audio versions. Here’s the video version; check out the audio information below.
A strikeout may be one of the most poetic events in a baseball game. Growing up with a speech impediment, a young Ernie Harwell was assigned to recite poems, including “House by the Side of the Road,” Sam Walter Foss, which featured the last two lines:
“Let me live in my house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.”
Those verses ended up being quoted often by the erudite Harwell to describe a strikeout:
“He stood there like the house by the side of the road, and watched the ball go by.”
In this episode, Jesse Goldberg-Strassler explains the Harwell strikeout call as well as other colorful terms for strikeouts. This first episode of Tales from The Baseball Thesaurus runs down the unique terms for a strikeout, certainly a key part of baseball’s distinctive patois. You can find The Baseball Thesaurus at augustpublications.com.
We’ll continue to post video versions of Tales from The Baseball Thesaurus and the Ballpark Digest Broadcaster Chat to the site and Facebook for your employment. We’ve also added podcast versions of the Ballpark Digest Broadcaster Chat to wherever you download your podcasts–Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, etc. You can subscribe to the Ballpark Digest podcasts here:
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Besides Jesse’s debut with Tales from the Baseball Thesaurus, we’ll also be hosting a special edition of the Ballpark Digest Broadcaster Chat, discussing Southern League history with longtime Voice of the Birmingham Barons Curt Bloom and Mark McCarter, author of Never a Bad Game: Fifty-Plus Years of the Southern League. With MiLB undergoing serious changes this offseason, Bloom and McCarter will review the people, players and venues who made the Southern League great. Look for it this week!
RELATED STORIES: Our Broadcaster Chats now available as podcast downloads; Ballpark Digest Broadcaster Chat for February 16, 2021