Catch a walk?
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Garden-path photo caption of the day:
Reading this, I spent a few seconds trying to figure out how fans could catch a walk, off a home run or in any other circumstance.
I knew the phrase "walk-off home run", meaning a home run that puts the home team ahead in the bottom of the final inning of a baseball game, and thus permits them (and everybody else) to walk off the field without any further game-play. But by the time my on-line sentence processing system got to "off", it was too late.
A hyphen in "walk-off" would have helped.
Dmitri said,
September 19, 2009 @ 10:34 am
There's some debate in learned sporting circles about who exactly is doing the walking off in a situation like this: should the intelligent sportscaster report the event by saying "And the Mariners walk off!!!" or "And Ichiro forces the Yankees to walk off!!!"
In practice, sportscasters typically say the former. But the nattering nabobs worry that the team that is batting may not have any players on the field at all, other than the batter. When you're at the game, you notice the losing team doing the large majority of the walking. This begs the question (*) of whether the "walking off" might originally have been done by the losing team, with the meaning gradually shifting over time.
(*) Go ahead, I dare you …
Peter Taylor said,
September 19, 2009 @ 11:12 am
Aren't both teams walking off? That, at least, would seem the case to an ignorant Brit who doesn't know much baseball terminology.
rolig said,
September 19, 2009 @ 11:16 am
Ah, hyphens are much missed. In olden days, two would have been required here: "try to catch a walk-off home-run hit", making everything perfectly clear (at least to those who understand the baseball idiom "walk off"), and consistent as well.
MattF said,
September 19, 2009 @ 11:27 am
In the old days… when a hyphen was a hyphen, dammit.
language hat said,
September 19, 2009 @ 11:31 am
This is not a case of These Degenerate Times, this is merely a missing hyphen, almost certainly a typo (and hardly worthy, I would have thought, of a LL post). And I have been reading baseball coverage for half a century and don't recall ever seeing a home run referred to as a "home-run hit." Are your "olden days" the 19th century?
Morten Jonsson said,
September 19, 2009 @ 12:22 pm
"Hit" is a noun, not a verb, in "home run hit."
J. W. Brewer said,
September 19, 2009 @ 12:39 pm
I would analyze that as "walk off home run" modified by the participial phrase "hit by [Ichiro]" rather than "walk off home run hit" modified by the prepositional/agentive phrase "by [Ichiro]," so contra Morten J. I believe "hit" is serving as verb (or at least participle) rather than noun here. But I agree that the "catching a walk" concept is distracting. However, this is not the usual garden-path problem where the direction you tentatively think the sentence is going based on an erroneous preliminary parsing is plausible but wrong — here by contrast the premature analysis leads to a bizarre/nonsensical result semantically.
Lazar said,
September 19, 2009 @ 1:36 pm
@Dmitri: I've heard that the phrase was originated by Dennis Eckersley, and that he meant it to refer to the losing team (or in particular, the losing pitcher) walking off in shame. Attested here: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1019718/index.htm
ø said,
September 19, 2009 @ 1:42 pm
1) One who has read the headline (and who knows a bit about baseball) will know it was a walk-off hit before getting to the photo caption, reducing the chance of confusion (not that that excuses the hyphenlessness).
2) I am morally certain that "hit" was not a noun.
Morten Jonsson said,
September 19, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
Sorry, yes, a verb, not a noun. Does anyone else ever say exactly the opposite of what they mean sometimes?
Jerry Friedman said,
September 19, 2009 @ 2:45 pm
@Morten Jonsson: "Does anyone else ever say exactly the opposite of what they mean sometimes?"
Never. :-)
@Language Hat: Why do you think the lack of a hyphen is a typo? Out of the first 50 Google hits for "'walk-off home run' suck" (with "suck" in there to avoid edited news reports), 26 lack hyphens. At Google Groups it was 19 out of 50. That seems like a lot for a typo. (I'm surprised it's so low—I rarely see hyphens in unedited text, except in forums where people care about language, or between words where the hyphens don't belong according to American standards.)
Barbara Phillips Long said,
September 19, 2009 @ 10:30 pm
I would use:
…fans try to catch the ball from a walk-off home run hit by…
Yes, the missing hyphen does throw the reader off, but I think having "ball" in before "walk-off" is more accurate and also helps the reader interpret the sentence more easily.
Bob Lieblich said,
September 19, 2009 @ 11:18 pm
In the circles in which I circle (a federal Government law office), the hyphen is going the way of the serial comma and the colon. I sent out a memo some time ago offering hyphens free of charge to all who needed them. No one took me up on it. So I spend my days amid talk of the likes of "Government furnished property) and "Navy specific tooling."
If there's anything I find strange about Mark's post, it's his incredulity at such a common event. (Well, maybe he travels in more learned circles.)
ShadowFox said,
September 20, 2009 @ 12:07 am
Hmm… That's bizarre–I posted a comment earlier and it disappeared.
It was actually the earliest comment–within a couple of minutes of the original post. Here's the text:
There is also the question of the headline. Did Suzuki club Rivera with the 2 outs and is he going to get charged with assault?
Vidor said,
September 20, 2009 @ 11:05 am
***There's some debate in learned sporting circles about who exactly is doing the walking off in a situation like this: should the intelligent sportscaster report the event by saying "And the Mariners walk off!!!" or "And Ichiro forces the Yankees to walk off!!!"***
Neither. The announcer says "That's a walk-off home run for Ichiro/the Mariners" or "the Mariners win on a walk-off home run by Ichiro".
language hat said,
September 20, 2009 @ 12:18 pm
Because this, unlike your Google hits, is edited text. You can find all the misspellings and other errors you want in random web pages; what does that have to do with it? If it appears in a newspaper, it's a typo.
Aaron Davies said,
September 20, 2009 @ 2:12 pm
i sometimes wish, not just for the return of the hyphen, but for the invention of multiple layers of hyphens. it might help reduce misanalyses if we could write, e.g., "post-traumatic=stress disorder" to indicate the binding order of the adjectives.
Morten Jonsson said,
September 20, 2009 @ 4:01 pm
Actually, publishers do use multiple layers of hyphens, in a way. In that phrase "post-traumatic stress disorder," the hyphen should actually be an en dash, signifying that "post" modifies the whole phrase "traumatic stress disorder." A hyphen would mean that "post" modifies only "stress" and the two together modify "stress disorder." It's one of those practices that would be immensely useful if readers actually noticed it.
rolig said,
September 20, 2009 @ 7:12 pm
My comment about "in olden days" was facetious. That said, I do like hyphens, which do tend to make syntactic relationships clearer if used systematically. Now I see that "hit" in the caption is what we used to call a past participle back when I was learning English grammar (ca. 1970), so my suggestion that there should be a hyphen in "home run" was, to the say the least, a foul ball.
Dmajor said,
September 20, 2009 @ 8:50 pm
Can the Yankees coach tell his players that, yes, the loss hurts, but that they should just "walk it off"?
Vidor said,
September 20, 2009 @ 10:57 pm
Also, sometimes you see it typed as one word. "Walkoff".
Faldone said,
September 21, 2009 @ 9:41 am
If this is a garden path I see it as so overgrown with brambles that I have trouble understanding why anyone would take it. The phrase "walk off home run" is so well established in the genre that I don't see why anyone would think anything else, even with the line break between "off" and "home". Maybe, just maybe, if the line break had been between "walk" and "off"", perhaps, but even then it strains my credulity.
Levi Montgomery said,
September 21, 2009 @ 11:10 am
As someone who cares fairly passionately about the English language and not one whit about baseball, I failed to make any sense at all of the caption, until I read the comment thread. So perhaps familiarity with the genre would have helped, but I am far too cynical accept the omission of the hyphen as a true typo (meaning an error in typography), as opposed to one more slip down the slope. As noted above, far too many of the hyphens one does see are misplaced (The workers were laid-off last Wednesday), and the ones that should have been used are ignored.
Jerry Friedman said,
September 21, 2009 @ 11:16 am
I understood a typo to be an error that someone makes because they're typing (or, in the old days, typesetting). They wouldn't make it in handwriting.
I haven't done a survey, but specific typos aren't all that common even in unedited text. Where a spelling error is really common, such as "Dalmation", there usually seems to be some other reason for it. That's why I said that the apparently high frequency of this error suggests that in unedited text, it's not a typo, there's another reason for it—such as that people think it's correct. If so, the error might well occur in edited text for the same reason, and I don't think we can conclude it's a typo.
Why does the occurrence of an error in edited text, or in a newspaper, make it a typo? If the writer made the mistake, the later editing has nothing to do with why the writer made it. (If anything, I think the fact that the text is edited makes the error less likely to be typographical, because unfortunately some mistakes are introduced by editors, who type a little at a time and therefore seem less likely to make typos.)
Another reason to doubt this error was a typo is that typos reflect the arrangement of the keyboard and motion of fingers. On a qwerty keyboard the hyphen is nowhere near the space bar. I sometime commit typos involving spaces (usually metatheses), but I don't remember ever meaning to type a hyphen but ending up with a space, and it doesn't strike me as likely for other people.
Chud said,
September 21, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
Regarding who is doing the walking-off, during a lull in a Texas Rangers TV broadcast, the play-by-play man relayed an emailed question to Tom Grieve, the color man (who, before he began broadcasting was a player and a general manager for the Rangers): What is meant by a "walk-off" home run? Grieve explained that (as Eckersley is cited above) it's the visiting team in the field that is doing the walking-off. Whereas my impression (having played only one year or organized baseball when I was 10) was that it was the batter doing the walking-off. I guess assuming that it was a walk-off single, the batter would just walk off the field after having touched first base. But certainly it makes sense that the fielders are doing more walking than the runners could possibly be doing. And, it seems, in real life, the home team is usually running around and jumping up and down when a walk-off occurs.
Faldone said,
September 21, 2009 @ 12:17 pm
Now I'm curious about the typographical history of this term. Was it hyphenated from the beginning? If so, the transition to an unhyphenated would be opposite of that of the sport itself, which started as two distinct words, base ball, and went to the hyphenated version, base-ball, finally becoming the modern single word, baseball. There was a time during the early part of the 20th century when it was seen in all three versions.
Stephen Jones said,
September 21, 2009 @ 12:34 pm
With regard to Language Hat's point it would depend if the copy editor was an assiduous follower of the hyphenation rule. Or that he was an assiduous follower of baseball.
Jerry Friedman said,
September 21, 2009 @ 4:01 pm
@Faldone:
The first hits in Google Books and in the New York Times are from 2000 and use a hyphen.
As I'd think an expression like this would appear in journalism before books, and the Times is usually not the first by whom the new is tried, there are probably earlier uses in print.
PLT said,
September 21, 2009 @ 5:41 pm
For what it's worth, apparently the Japanese equivalent to "walk(-)off homerun" is a "sayonara homerun." Example here: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/sb20090426j1.html
Morten Jonsson said,
September 21, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
According to the Wikipedia entry for "Walk-off home run," we can thank the relief pitcher Dennis Eckersley for the term. The entry cites a San Francisco Chronicle column from 1988 (no link, but it shouldn't be hard to find), and the spelling was apparently "walkoff." The Chronicle's spelling; it's anyone's guess how Eck might have spelled it.
Faldone said,
September 22, 2009 @ 6:39 am
My standard, for documents over which I have some control, is that the noun will be one word and the verb two, unhyphenated. In my case, the noun/verb pair is usually "backup/back up". I have seen, in text not under my control, backup as a verb, with the past tense variously backupped and backuped.
Vidor said,
September 22, 2009 @ 3:43 pm
"Whereas my impression (having played only one year or organized baseball when I was 10) was that it was the batter doing the walking-off."
This is impossible, because the batter has to touch all the bases, at least if it's a solo home run. He can't "walk off" until he's come around to home.
(If there are other runners ahead of him the batter might not have to run all the bases. One example of this is the "Grand Slam Single" in the 1999 NLCS, when Robin Ventura hit what should have been a grand slam to win the game 7-3, except he was mobbed by a crowd between first and second. He was credited with a single and the Mets with a 4-3 win.)
Morten Jonsson said,
September 22, 2009 @ 7:05 pm
According to that 1988 San Francisco Chronicle column about Dennis Eckersley, it's the pitcher who walks off.
Vidor said,
September 22, 2009 @ 7:54 pm
"According to that 1988 San Francisco Chronicle column about Dennis Eckersley, it's the pitcher who walks off."
It's the whole team!