FW: Query about "delill" (baseball bat)

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

>  Would anyone on this list have information about  "delill" (type of baseball bat)?  Skip McAfee is the assistant to Paul Dickson, author of the standard dictionary on baseball terms.
>
> Gerald Cohen
> P.S. FWIW, in all my reading of the baseball columns in the NY World (late 1880s - early 1890s) and San Francisco Bulletin (1912 - 1914) I never encountered the term "delill."
>
>
> ----------
> From:         19cBB at yahoogroups.com on behalf of Skip McAfee
> Reply To:     19cBB at yahoogroups.com
> Sent:         Monday, February 20, 2006 1:49 PM
> To:   19cBB at yahoogroups.com
> Subject:      [19cBB] Delill
>
> I'm trying to locate a primary reference for this term.  A "delill" is a short bat, 18 to 24 inches long, shaped like a miniature baseball bat, used in town ball games.  According to Alfred Rochefort (Healthful Sports for Boys, 1910, p.23), the batter holds the delill in one hand and "allows the swiftly thrown ball to strike his club and glance off at an angle to a part of the grounds where no fielders are on the outlook for it."
>
> Rochefort is a secondary source, as are those of Irving Leitner (1972) and Dan Beard (no date).  I'm searching for a primary source, as well as information on the etymology of the term.  ProQuest failed to provide any such information.
>
> Skip McAfee
> xerxes7 at earthlink.net
>
>
>
>

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