Sport: Diz on Diz

gillette, n. Fast pitch near batter’s whiskers.

cockeye, n. Left-handed pitcher.

union hours, n. coll. Nine-inning game.

zebra, n. Fast outfielder.

After two years of hurling such dusters at his St. Louis radio audience of 1,000,000, Jerome Herman Dean has explained all— in The Dizzy Dean Dictionary and What’s What in Baseball. His sponsor, St. Louis’ Falstaff Brewery, planted the idea; an adman wrote the book. Despite this hybridism, the result is pure Dean, so pure that Diz threatens to “write another soon.” Meanwhile Opus No. 1 has gone through 25,000 copies in ten days.

“I’ve wrote this thing because I wanta clear up a lot of misunderstandings people have about baseball . . .” he explains in a “forward.” Two prime misunderstandings:

—A Cardinal scout signed Dean as a cockeye after watching him pitch rocks at squirrels. Dizzy patiently explains: “I throw so hard with my right arm that I squash up them squirrels somethin’ turrible and they ain’t fit eatin’. . . . When I’m out rustlin’ up our grub … I got to throw left-handed.”

—Diz averaged 20 wins a year in five and a half seasons until a line drive in the 1937 All-Star game broke his toe. Diz rested for a fortnight, then tried out a new delivery that favored the bad foot. “There was a loud crack in my shoulder, and my arm went numb down to my fingers. . . . Ol’ Diz’s great arm was never goin’ to be the same. . . .”

That’s how an author was born.