[Ads-l] Crooked number

[Ben Zimmer]

Paul Dickson, in _The Dickson Baseball Dictionary_ (3rd ed.) dates "crooked
number" back to 1993, citing a _New Yorker_ piece by Roger Angell. Angell
credits Tony La Russa (who was then managing the Oakland A's).

https://books.google.com/books?id=ceeU7xSLw5kC&pg=PA226

On Mon, Jun 28, 2021 at 2:07 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> Around for a while, but I don’t know how long a while either.  Often in
> the form “put up a crooked number”, with “on the (score)board” understood.
> Presumably 8 counts a crooked even though 0 doesn’t.
>
> LH
>
>
> > On Jun 28, 2021, at 8:14 AM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
> >
> > I'm sure this predates me by several decades but I'm increasingly
> noticing
> > "crooked number" in baseball slang. In particular, the full expression is
> > "put a crooked number on the board", but abbreviated versions exist as
> > well. Here, the crooked number is 4.
> >
> > https://nypost.com/2021/06/27/yankees-gerrit-cole-ambushed-by-red-sox/
> > That crooked number was hard for us to overcome.
> >
>
>

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