on-writing-well

180 ON WRITING WELL
any pig farmer—and describe the frenzied bleacherites caught
up in the excitement of the autumn classic. I could, in short,
write sports English instead of good English, as if they were two
different languages. They're not. Just as in writing about science
or any other field, there's no substitute for the best.
What, you might ask, is wrong with "southpaw"? Shouldn't
we be grateful for a word so picturesque? Why isn't it a relief to
have twirlers and circuit clouts instead of the same old pitchers
and home runs? The answer is that these words have become
even cheaper currency than the coins they were meant to
replace. They come flooding automatically out of the typewriter
of every scribe (sportswriter) in every press box.
The man who first thought of "southpaw" had a right to be
pleased. I like to think he allowed himself the small smile that is
the due of anyone who invents a good novelty. But how long ago
was that? The color that "southpaw" added to the language has
paled with decades of repetition, along with the hundreds of
other idioms that form the fabric of daily sportswriting. There is
a weariness about them. We read the articles to find out who
won, but we don't read them with enjoyment.
The best sportswriters know this. They avoid the exhausted
synonyms and strive for freshness elsewhere in their sentences.
You can search the columns of Red Smith and never find a batsman
bouncing into a twin killing; Smith wasn't afraid to let a batter
hit into a double play. But you will find hundreds of unusual
words—good English words—chosen with precision and fitted
into situations where no other sportswriter would put them. They
please us because the writer cared about using fresh imagery in a
journalistic form where his competitors settled for the same old
stuff. That's why Red Smith was still king of his field after half a
century of writing, and why his competitors had long since been
sent—as they would be the first to say—to the showers.
I can still remember many phrases in Red Smith s columns
that took me by surprise with their humor and originality. Smith