Baseball Season Is Back; Let’s Celebrate with Its Most Absurd Jargon
Baseball is, at its heart, a beautiful game of slow, ambling stretches, highlighted by occasional dashes of jubilant excitement. It goes from zero to 60 in an instant … and then back to zero for another half hour, leaving you waiting for the next explosion of activity. Those of us who love the game, even those of us cursed to love one of the worst teams of all time, simply take the most lethargic aspects of baseball in stride, even as we tend to worry out loud about the slow but steady intrusion of technology into what has always been a very analog sport.
Still, there are things about baseball that never have and never will change, even with instant replay or automated balls and strikes. Take, for instance, its crowning achievement: Regional hot dog variants. Oops, wait, no, I meant “confusing jargon.” No other American sport is blessed with so many bizarre sayings and folksy bits of gibberish as baseball, a testament perhaps to how many of the game’s legendary announcers retired as old men with clearly fraying memories and brain cells. Nevertheless, these figures gave us no shortage of weird expressions to indulge in during the course of any given seemingly endless broadcast, which is a great way to wile away an inning when your pitcher won’t stop walking guys. So in honor of the beginning of the 2026 MLB season this week, let us bask in some of the game’s classic, incomprehensible lingo.
1. Can of Corn
These little chestnut has been in play for nearly a century at this point, reportedly popularized by legendary radio announcer Red Barber in a career spanning four decades from the 1930s-1960s. It refers to a lazy fly ball that gives an outfielder plenty of time to get in position, resulting in an easy catch that anyone would be expected to make. Why “can of corn,” of all things? The conventional wisdom holds that the phrase dates back to the turn of the 20th century, referring to grocers who would knock objects off high shelves (such as canned corn) and catch the object in their voluminous aprons. If you’re an outfielder and you fail to catch a can of corn, that means you have fucked up.
Is there any actual historical evidence for this, or reason to accept this explanation? To that I say: Who cares, it’s baseball. Actual historical research into the origins of these phrases is somehow antithetical to the spirit of our bullshit, folksiness-powered game. All that matters is that it feels right.
2. Uncle Charlie
A curveball. That’s what it means. Why not just say “curveball”? Well, how deep down a historical rabbit hole do you feel like going? The inspiration for the name was reportedly former Harvard University President Charles Eliot, who in 1884 opined on the newly created curveball by essentially calling it a showy piece of deception that was unbecoming of the fine lads at Harvard to be engaging in. The pitch was subsequently nicknamed after him, as both “Uncle Charlie” and occasionally “Lord Charles” or “Sir Charles.” There has been much historical debate about Eliot’s actual quote, with a pithier, paraphrased modern version eventually being substituted. As far as I can tell, though, this was the man’s original gripe in 1884 about the ungentlemanly pitch.
For the pitcher, instead of delivering the ball to the batter in an honest, straightforward way, that the latter may exert his strength to the best advantage in knocking it, now uses every effort to deceive him by curving—I think that is the word—the ball. And this is looked upon as the last triumph of athletic science and skill. I tell you it is time to call halt! when the boasted progress in athletics is in the direction of fraud and deceit.
It would be pretty funny to see Eliot’s reaction to modern sliders, sweepers and splitters, given his thoughts on “fraud and deceit.”
3. In the Catbird Seat
What, you thought you could escape from Paste’s irrepressible birding coverage within the pages of Splinter? Well I hate to disappoint you, but the birds are already inside the house, and they’ve taken up residence in the catbird seat.
This phrase, which more or less means “sitting pretty” or “in an advantageous position,” might be used when a batter has worked the ball-strike count in his favor, or has runners in scoring position with no outs. It implies that the hitter is in a position of opportunity, where the odds are high that he’ll capitalize. It is indeed a birding reference, specifically to the gray catbird, a relative of the mockingbird known for its penchant to perch on a high point where it can oversee the area around it and swoop into action when food presents itself. This phrase also may have been coined by Red Barber, although as a White Sox fan I heard it endlessly from longtime White Sox announcer Hawk Harrelson, himself a perpetual font of baseball nonsense jargon who coined many inane expressions.
The namesake, on his namesake.
4. Duck Snort, or Dying Quail
I promise that not all of these are bird related, but how odd is it that there are not only multiple bird-related entries here, but two separate, bird-related expressions that are actually variations of each other? Both “duck snort” and “dying quail” in fact mean the same thing: A softly hit fly ball in which the batter makes poor contact, but it proves to be a blessing in disguise when the shallowly looping pop fly drops between the infielders and the outfielders for a base hit. “Duck snort” was apparently coined by the aforementioned Hawk Harrelson as a more family-friendly variation upon the phrase “duck fart,” while I can only imagine that “dying quail” must refer to the way this type of hit weakly falls to earth. They both sound ridiculous, but nevertheless are things you still might hear during a broadcast to this day.
5. TOOTBLAN
Let’s hold some space here not just for verbal expressions, but also for some of baseball’s prolific generation of strange acronyms, most likely the result of a century of fans scoring the game on tiny scorecards. This resulted in universal acronyms for most basic baseball statistics, such as ERA (earned run average) or WHIP (Walks plus hits per inning pitched), and modern models of things like pitch effectiveness with names like Stuff+. This culture has also resulted in more comical acronyms such as TOOTBLAN, which means, and I quote: “Thrown Out on the Bases Like a Nincompoop.”
Essentially, a TOOTBLAN refers to a boneheaded base-running play, wherein a runner gets picked off, forgets how many outs there are, makes an ill-advised decision to take an extra base, or just brings the wrath of the fandom down on himself by being thrown out in a situation when they had no business running. Since being coined in the late 2000s, this one has steadily worked its way deep enough into baseball culture that it’s now part of MLB’s official glossary. Please enjoy this supercut of embarrassed runners being caught in TOOTBLAN situations.
6. Oppo Taco
Baseball jargon expressions are not all particularly clever or esoteric: Sometimes simply rhyming is good enough. “Oppo taco” refers to a home run hit by a batter to the “opposite field,” which is to say the direction that is not naturally where a power hitter’s swing would drive the ball. Traditionally, the easiest way to hit a home run is to lift a strongly hit fly ball in the air to your “pull side,” which means you’re catching the ball with the bat head in front of the plate–thus, a right-handed hitter will pull the ball to left field. It’s significantly harder to hit a home run to the opposite field, as it implies that your swing was slightly later, and thus generates less power. Only stronger hitters, therefore, can hit a home run to the opposite field, making an “oppo taco” more notable. Why “taco”? Because it’s easy to say. As far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no other explanation, but you can buy a taco-themed shirt to this effect if you really want.
7. Worm Burner
Now here’s some proper nonsense. A “worm burner” is a ground ball that is hit very hard by a batter into the ground, where it rolls and skips without bouncing or losing much speed, hugging the dirt. This is apparently quite deleterious to any worms that have taken up residence on the field, if the name is to be believed. Which is all to say: It’s a very quickly rolling ground ball.
But wait. This is the only item on this list, and one of the only pieces of baseball jargon I’m aware of, that apparently has another, entirely different meaning when applied in women’s softball. There, it apparently refers to an underhanded pitch (softball players throw underhand) that is thrown fast and low, just barely scraping over the plate, being quite difficult to catch. The Baseball Almanac amusingly refers to this version of a “worm burner” as a pitch that “appears at crucial moments in [a] game, usually when [the] pitcher has lost her ‘stuff’ [and it is] hazardous to animals, plant life, catcher’s shins, and umpire’s feet.”
8. LOOGY
It’s not what it sounds like. No, it’s another one of baseball’s beautiful acronyms, although it describes a type of player that is essentially a dying breed, a type of pitcher that has effectively been rendered extinct by baseball’s rule updates in the last decade. “LOOGY” stood for “Lefty One-Out GuY,” which I’m sure you’ll agree is the best kind of acronym–a painfully forced one. As the name would imply, this would be a left-handed relief pitcher who a manager would often call on later in a game specifically to face a single, tough left -handed batter in a key situation, because hitters typically have a harder time hitting a pitcher who is the same handedness as themselves. The rise of the LOOGY was part of MLB’s increasing bullpen specialization from the 1980s-2010s, and they eventually became part of pretty much every team–there were even some right-handed variants people referred to as ROOGYs.
However, the classic LOOGY met his demise with MLB’s efforts to speed up baseball games by limiting constant slowdowns such as pitching changes, with a rule first enforced in 2020 requiring any pitcher who enters the game to face at least three batters. There are still lefty specialists you would otherwise refer to as a LOOGY, but given that they all now have to face three batters, it would be … LTOGY? Suffice to say, the magic is kind of gone, but we purists will keep its memory alive.
9. Cement Mixer
There are just as many terms for thrown pitches in baseball as there are types of batted balls, and although some of these terms might be applied to a beautifully thrown pitch, “cement mixer” would not be one of them. A cement mixer implies a poorly thrown breaking ball such as a slider or curveball, one where the pitcher’s mechanics or delivery may not have been quite right, which causes the pitch to have less movement/break than usual, or leaves it sitting right over the middle of the plate. To a hitter, this looks like the pitch is just slowly rotating or “churning” like a turning cement mixer. Suffice to say, this is pretty much every hitter’s dream, as a slower breaking pitch that fails to break and stays over the center of the plate is one of the easiest pitches in baseball to hit hard. If a pitcher is throwing cement mixers, he probably won’t be out there on the mound for much longer.
10. Golden Sombrero
I’ve heard it said that “golden sombrero” is a bit of cross-sports jargon pollination, taking inspiration from hockey’s “hat trick” (scoring three goals in a game), embiggening it, and then reversing it into a shameful negative instead of a triumphant positive. You see, in baseball, the person wearing the hat is someone who has disgraced himself via repeated strikeouts, and if a hat trick refers to three of something, then a sombrero must be bigger. Therefore: A Golden Sombrero refers to the dubious achievement of a player striking out four times in one game. It’s not an especially rare distinction, although if you look at the career list of leaders, you’ll note that most of them were feared and prolific power hitters–which makes sense, because they’re the only type of player whose high numbers of strikeouts would be tolerated, because they also hit home runs. Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton holds the lifetime mark with 30 career golden sombreros.
But wait, it gets loftier and more infamous. There’s also the far more rare platinum sombrero, which of course refers to a game with five strikeouts. Only four players have ever recorded more than one platinum sombrero in their careers. Only eight total, meanwhile, have ever earned six strikeouts in a game (sometimes called a “Titanium Sombrero”), but every one of those came in extra innings games. The record for strikeouts in a standard, nine-inning game remains merely five.
And now that you know this absurd terminology, I expect you to incessantly share it with all around you the next time you’re within earshot of a baseball game airing on TV. Such is the way that these units of cultural currency are passed on–and if we teach one more person what a TOOTBLAN is, we’ll have done our jobs as baseball fans and appeased the sport’s patron deities.