[Ads-l] magic number

[Ben Zimmer]

I wrote about baseball's "magic number" for the WSJ in 2021.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/magic-number-baseballs-mystical-end-of-season-calculus-11633039077?st=VHECWy&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

An excerpt, with links:

---
In the early 20th century, "magic number" came to be applied to targets
that a team might have at the end of a season. [John] Thorn discovered a
September 1912 article in the Detroit Times  leading with the news that
"the digit '4' is the magic number in the big league races today." In the
American League, the Boston Red Sox needed four wins to match the
single-season record, and in the National League, the New York Giants were
"only four games separated" from winning the pennant.
https://newspaperarchive.com/sports-clipping-sep-24-1912-2721781/

Twenty-five years later, in 1937, an Associated Press wire story in the
News-Journal of Clovis, New Mexico, appeared with the subheading, "Six is
Magic Number," explaining that "any combination of six—six wins for the
Giants, six losses for the Cubs, or a sum making that total—clinches the
pennant for the New Yorkers."
https://www.newspapers.com/article/clovis-news-journal-magic-number/36262299/

The phrasing would catch on in baseball coverage in the early 1940s, with
the New York Daily News trumpeting the "magic number" of local teams or, as
they sometimes called it, the "charmed number."
https://www.newspapers.com/article/daily-news-magic-number/86173993/
https://www.newspapers.com/article/daily-news-magic-number/86174191/
---


On Sat, Sep 14, 2024 at 4:58 PM James Landau <
00000c13e57d49b8-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

> It's that time of year again, and we keep hearing about the "magic number"
> for division-leading teams (as of last night, the magic number for the
> Philadelphia Phillies was 9, that is, any combination of 9 wins by the
> Phillies and losses by the New Yorik Mets gives the Phillies the National
> League East pennant.
> Here's the earliest usage I could find on Google Books:
> American Magazine  Volumes 142-143  page 39  year 1946
> https://books.google.com/books?id=Ilt5OP_f3xsC&q=
> "magic+number%27%2Bbaseball&dq="magic+number%27%2Bbaseball&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi2uMuNp8OIAxU8M1kFHam_KiA4FBDoAXoECAUQAg
>
> "The next year the magic number of 21 tilted the scales in the
> championship race.  The Chicago Cubs won 21 straight in the September
> straightaway.  The last link in that chain was represented by a victory
> over the Cardinals in St. Louis, and it clinched the pennant for the Cubs"
> note bene:  this was a snippet view, I could not find anything confirming
> the date of the issue (Google Books said 1946) and the wording was not
> conclusive that the text matched the definition I gave above of "magic
> number".
> Does anyone have a better citation?
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org