Baseball "the real katish" (1898)

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

   Barry Popik, in his lexical wanderings, turned up an 1898 newspaper article which contains the slang term "katish", which does not seem to be listed in the slang dictionaries.  A baseball player who is "the real katish" is a daisy, a corker, hot stuff.
      As for the origin of this term, I would like to run a bold suggestion by ads-l:
If pronounced on the first syllable, the term sounds very similar to "Kaddish,"
the solemn mourners' prayer in the Jewish religious service. Anyone familiar with it knows it contains a series of glorifications of God. Could it be that those solemn glorifications were transferred in the mind of the newspaper man to that of "hot stuff/daisy/corker" baseball player?

   I advance this suggestion hesitantly and will gladly withdraw it upon the first evidence of weakness.  I'll have Barry's item appear in the October issue of Comments on Etymology, and if the suggestion is in fact weak, it would be good to know this before I advance it in hard-copy. But if the suggestion is valid, it would represent one of the most remarkable semantic developments in American slang (which already has no shortage of them).

    The  relevant quote (excerpted) is:

        "And the magnate is telling his friends, the newspaper men, that his first baseman will be a daisy--the real katish."   "What does he mean by the real katish?"         "The real katish is baseball for hot stuff."    "Oh, I see."

Gerald Cohen