Tales from The Baseball Thesaurus: Muffins

Ballpark Digest Broadcaster Chats

There are plenty of great names for baseball superstars—meal tickets or cash cows—but the more interesting names are for the worst players, the muffins, as Jesse Goldberg-Strassler explains in this week’s Tales from The Baseball Thesaurus.

If you are a player, you don’t want to be known by these names: a KP (can’t play), an NP (non-prospect) or a JAG (just a guy), among an abundance of derisive monikers. Yet these players get signed, and once they are they are riders of the lonesome pine, a benchwarmer, a bench polisher.

A great term, however, is a muffin, a term created way back in 1868 by the legendary Henry Chadwick: a player who is both practically and theoretically unacquainted with the game. Under the early management of the game, however, the muffins would actually play: after the regular competition, there would be a muffin game, to the delight of all. And the impact of the muffins continued to this day: when an error is made on an easy play, the fielder is said to have muffed the play.

Goldberg-Strassler shares his insights on the colorful patois of America’s Pastime in this weekly podcast. You can find The Baseball Thesaurus at augustpublications.com.