Spanish to English Baseball Dictionary?!

A retired professor of spanish at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is publishing a Spanish-English dictionary with over NINE THOUSAND entries consisting solely of "baseball speech."

Via Baseball Think Factory:

A batter striking out in Mexico is "served chocolates, or chocolatized.'' Far less tasty is another Mexican idiom for going down on strikes - "being served a bowl of pigeon soup.''

Americans talk about "a can of corn'' for an easy catch. That's far too bland for Venezuela's taste, where one expression for a routine play, or a 1-2-3 inning, is a three-course offering of "french fries, peanuts and fried bananas.''

In Cuba's biting slang, a weak hitter is "an out dressed up like a player.''

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The baseball dictionary contains four pages of Spanish words or phrases for home run. Strikeout merits about three. There are about a half-dozen Spanish words for outfielder - gardener, patrolman, hunter, guardian of the woods, or fence guard.

I love baseball. To me, there is nothing that mirrors the culture of the people and time and place in which it exists as much as baseball does. Anything which celebrates that fact is fine by me:

"As you go from country to country you hear that particular culture reflected in the language, in the language of baseball,'' O'Neill said. "It's close to the culture. I have no idea where some of these come from, but I love them.''

Now I just need a Spanish Profanity-English dictionary for the baseball terms that my friends use at our games. Like there are four pages for "home run" in the O'Neill dictionary, I think there will probably have to be at least a page or two for the different ways of saying "****" in mine.

Original source, Sports Illustrated