Greasy = dirty?

[Alice Faber]

Jim Parish wrote:
> Alice Faber wrote:
>>> "It's a greasy job," he said, "but somebody has to do it."
>> (The speaker is a minor-league player, probably c. 20, from Western Canada.)
>>
>> More generally, in hockey, "greasy" generally means "gritty" or "tough":
>
> Not directly related, but recently I've begun seeing the word "filthy"
> used on baseball blogs to mean "extremely deceptive / hard to hit", as
> in "a filthy curveball". I don't recall seeing it before this season.
>

ESPN's Baseball Tonight has added to their nightly set of highlights
(balls that left the yard, web gems) a compendium of best pitches of the
evening in which the hosts chorus "that's not nasty, that's FILTHY".

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Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
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