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

[Jonathan Lighter]

My guess too.

JL

On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 5:44 PM, Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at mst.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Cohen, Gerald Leonard" <gcohen at MST.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "the slap" = "the plate"? Baseball slang, 1903
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>
> May be a typo for "the slab."
>
> Gerald Cohen
>
> ________________________________
>
> Message fromJoel S. Berson, Sun 4/15/2012 4:38 PM
>
>  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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