Linguistics and baseball

Two of my favorite armchair hobbies come together in Dan Shaughnessy's column in the Boston Globe today. He looks at the origin of the word walkoff.

If the game ends with the home team at bat, it's a walkoff win because the beaten visitors are forced to walk off the field in disgrace.

Few of today's major leaguers can remember when they first noticed the new terminology, but there's little doubt ESPN has put walkoff into the mainstream of American sports talk....

According to ''The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary," the first walkoff reference appeared July 30, 1988, in the Gannett News Service: ''In Dennis Eckersley's colorful vocabulary, a walkoff piece is a home run that wins the game and the pitcher walks off the mound."

My interest here? I took a couple of linguistics classes in college and might have majored in it except for the evil Professor Lieberman. And I was an all-star third baseman in the 9-year-olds' league before my career entered a tailspin. I remember my shining moment that year, a walkoff double driving in the winning run and resulting in a pigpile on me at second base. Three years later I hung up my cleats for good when I couldn't get a hit in batting practice.