outfielders as "foresters", "gardeners"

[Gerald Cohen]

    Barry Popik's mention yesterday that in Puerto Rican baseball,
outfielders are dubbed "foresters" has a sort of parallel in early
19th century standard baseball lingo: "gardener" (=outfielder).
Dickson's _Baseball Dictionary_ gives 1902 as its first attestation,
and in the 1913 baseball columns of the _San Francisco Bulletin_,  I
occasionally find "gardener" = outfielder. E.g., April 11, 1913,
p.18/2; title: "Commuters [i.e., the Oakland team] Justify Their
Claim...": "A number of hard-hit balls which would have netted the
batter extra base wallops on a smaller field have been easy outs for
the gardeners."

---Gerald Cohen

>PUERTO RICAN BASEBALL
>
>    From the NEW YORK TIMES, travel section 10, 28 February 1965, pg.
>64, col. 2:
>    Many American baseball terms, such as "hit" and "home run," are
>used, but there is a special Puerto Rican flavor when the
>pinch-hitter is announced as an _emergente_.  This lends a real
>sense of emergency to the situation.
>_Into the Forest_
>    Outfielders are cheerfully dubbed "foresters," perhaps recalling
>some earlier day when the field was so small that the man in the
>outfield really was out under the trees.
>