"the slap" = "the plate"? Baseball slang, 1903

[Joel S. Berson]

 From today's Sunday NY Times Sports section, p. 9, "Catcher's Tears
Were a Likely Inspiration for Rickey", by Chris Lamb, on Charles
Thomas, a black baseball player for Ohio Wesleyan, and Branch Rickey,
his coach at the time and the same age as Thomas.  Lamb quotes an
article from The Daily Journal-Herald of Delaware, Ohio, June 5, 1903:

"The feature of the game was witnessed in the first inning when
Thomas stepped up to the slap and slammed the spheroid against the
backyard fence for a home run."

I don't know what baseball slang dictionaries would be useful for
this.  Paul Dickson's "The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary" (GBooks,
preview) has "slap" as a noun meaning "A quick jab at a pitched
ball", no date given.  (It has "slap" as a verb first used
1912.)  "Slamming" a home run would not be a "slap hit", nor does
"stepped up to the slap" sound like an indirect way of describing a
hit.  The only sense I can make of the quotation is that "the slap" =
"the plate", home plate, perhaps in an extended sense of "the place
where one can slap a hit".  (But apparently one could also "slam" a
hit at "the slap".)

Joel

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