Let’s linger for a moment on this word, “scrappy.” It’s a linguistic spitball, this word, scuffed up and coated in foreign substances, and it has bucked and dived across nearly the whole of professional baseball’s history, entering the lexicon at the tag end of the 19th century with one meaning and leaving the next century with quite another.
The first player so labeled was probably John Carroll. He stood 5-foot-7 and played the outfield for the most part, ending his career with Cleveland in 1887. “Scrappy” was his nickname, for reasons now lost to history, though it’s likely it referred to a pugnacious disposition, i.e., he was prone to scraps. It’s difficult to know, though, because the christening of Scrappy Carroll went on behind the back of the Oxford English Dictionary, which locates the first use of “scrappy,” in this sense, in 1895, nearly a decade after Carroll had left the game. According to Jonathan Lighter, editor of The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, this usage of “scrappy” was at least popularized, if not coined, on our baseball diamonds.
“‘Scrappy,’ in those days, meant that you would fight at the drop of a hat,” says John Thorn, editor of Total Baseball.
…”Scrappy” approached the new century, then, as “the consolation prize of baseball adjectives—like saying a girl has a nice sense of humor,” Thorn says. The model was established by the relentlessly overpraised 5-foot-7 shortstop David Eckstein, who had the good fortune of being a slow, limp-armed, dink-and-dunking mediocrity who was not so bad at the plate as to prevent two of his teams from winning the World Series, and who not incidentally is as white as the fresh-fallen snow. Eckstein remains the sort of guy who makes Fox announcers sound like the front row of a Jonas Brothers show. He even won a World Series MVP with the Cardinals in 2006, mostly on the strength of a few doubles, of which at least one would’ve been caught had the Tigers not penciled in the moai of Easter Island in left field. (Poor Craig Monroe is probably still trying to get a read on that line drive.)
And now, in the twilight of Eckstein’s career and at the dawn of the Post-Steroid Era, the mantle has been passed to Pedroia. Today, “scrappy” serves as an implicit rebuke to the super-sized stars of the so-called Steroid Era, in much the same way it once carved out a fatuous distinction between white ballplayers and black and Latino ballplayers—the old spitball dancing once more on baseball’s ill winds. Pedroia has had to endure a lot of facile comparisons to Eckstein, whose game bears as much resemblance to Pedroia’s as it does to Manute Bol’s. Last year, with his big whip of a swing, Pedroia hit a robust .326 and rapped 73 extra-base hits, the 10th-best total all-time for any player 5-foot-9 or shorter. In addition, Pedroia’s 54 doubles came against 52 strikeouts, and he whiffed on only 8 percent of the pitches he swung at. “You used to see those kinds of numbers,” Theo Epstein says. “Like, Joe DiMaggio hit 30 homers and struck out 18 times or something. You don’t see that anymore. …I think [‘scrappy’] is just a convenient label for him. But it doesn’t really define who he is.”
Scrappy or not, Dustin Pedroia can flat-out hit. At least so far he can.
The 2009 Major League Baseball season begins in Philadelphia tonight at 8:05 with the first pitch from the Phillies’ Brett Myers to the Braves’ Yunel Escobar. The Phillies are, of course, the defending World Champions and my pick to repeat as the National League pennant winners. The Braves are one of the most improved teams in baseball entering the 2009 season, but one that I still believe will fall short of the playoffs.
