A real sentence spoken by a scout discussing a former colleague: “His written report was all bullsh*t, and that’s when I knew he was a horsesh*t guy.”
From Dollar Sign on the Muscle by Kevin Kerrane
Horseshit is my favorite baseball word, bar none. It’s not even close.
Dig this from Bruce Weber’s entertaining and informative book about the world of umpires, As They See ‘Em:
Umpire nation also has its own language, or at least a patois, and it is anything but delicate. The usual four-letter imprecations are well represented in the daily umpire lexicon, but it has one especially distinghuising feature: the word “horseshit.”
For some reason, “horseshit” is specifically a baseball term, having been the most popular and utilitarian curse word in the game for generations, as familiar a locution at the ballpark as “strike three.”
I suppose it’s a relative of “bullshit,” a word many people who aren’t in baseball casually use, though it doesn’t mean quite the same thing. “Bullshit” is basically a noun that means “baloney,” and it occasionally morphs into an adjective, e.g., a bullshit explanation. “Horseshit” is first and foremost an adjective, and though a horseshit explanation is, I suppose, the same thing as a bullshit explanation–and Webster’s defines the two words more or less the same way–in baseball “horseshit” means “worthless” or “irredeemable,” and it is applicable to, well, everything. A second baseman who has trouble with the double play turns a horseshit pivot; the home run hit off the lefty reliever came on a horseshit slider; the stretch of games through the middle of August that includes seventeen straight playing days and three doubleheaders is horseshit scheduling.
Far and away, however, the most frequent targets of the word are umpires. They have horseshit strike zones. They make horseshit calls. Their eyesight is horseshit. Their attitudes are horseshit. Their positioning is horseshit. At one game I attended, Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees celebrity third baseman, sauntered over to Bruce Froemming and gave him an unsolicited compliment, something about how much he appreciated all of Froemming’s years of professionalism. Froemming reported this to me, and when I asked Rodriguez about it the next day, he shrugged. He said Froemming, as the longest-serving umpire, deserved it.
“After all, all we do is tell them they’re horseshit,” Rodriguez said.
Hold on. Wait. Back up.
An A-Rod quote that had nothing to do with a) steroids, b) Madonna, c) Derek Jeter, d) muscled up strippers, or e) his egomania?
Wow. I'm impressed.
(sorry - sarcasm off - that was a nice excerpt)
How about being "full of shit?" The late great George Carlin repeatedly warned us all to be constantly on the lookout for such people... and they are easily identifiable, generally speaking.
That term most certainly applies to umpires, managers, owners, GM's, and players, too.
: )
Horseshit seems a little more engaging than bullshit, perhaps because of the soft consonant at the very beginning. You can be purple in the face and scream all kinds of "horseshit" in somebody's face and they will likely be amused to some degree. But the minute you say "Bullshit!"; now, now you're ready to fight. You've impugned on someone's honor and veracity, and now it's about to be on.
My best "Bullshit" story is from high school; I was working on a team project for Physics class that involved building a Rube Goldberg-inspired contraption within specific measurements that had to complete it's objective at 30 seconds. After weeks of R&D as well as testing, we finally got our contraption to meet the specs and proudly brought it in for installation the day before presentation.
The next morning, I was at my locker before homeroom when one of my teammates came running up to me and told me that the teacher disqualified our entry because it measured beyond a certain specification that was not disclosed until then: the depth was 3 inches too far.
Slam! "BULLSHIT!!!"
The entire corridor, teeming with students, fell silent. People froze in their tracks. Teachers up and down the hallway peeked their heads out of classroom doors. Someone ran off to get my girlfriend. I looked around, seething, yet blind with insanity. My girlfriend, a very tough girl mind you and not prone to public displays of affection, came running out of nowhere, saw the look in my eyes and hugged me, trying hard to soothe me and begging me to not to move.
Somehow, I found myself at the Dean's office, where I was allowed to cool off. The Dean was formerly the baseball coach, who's team I always failed to make, but for some reason he took a liking to me and we had many chats throughout my time in high school. He advised me not to go to class, but I figured I was sufficiently spent so that I wouldn't cause trouble. I did go to class, and though I said not a word throughout, my eyes burned a hole in the teacher's head, who repeatedly throughout gave a lame explanation that the specs of our project did not match the design specs given (or not completely given as the case was). She allowed our project to be judged and graded, but even the project stopped working the way we had designed and we received a D.
However, we got a measure of revenge: we entered it in a district-wide competition with the same notion of Rube Goldberg contraptions and rules, and without modifications whatsoever we won 2nd Place!
I passed that class, but even before that incident I was thoroughly turned off by her manner of teaching physics; after the incident I began to lose interest in science altogether, which was a tragedy because I grew up something of a science geek among other things. In this sense, she was a horseshit teacher (funny I should think of this on National Teacher Appreciation Day), but what she did and followed up with was in my mind complete bullshit.
[2] This article is evidence why Bull Durham may be the most accurate representation of baseball on film. Great post, Alex.
[4] I'm reminded of Carlin's bit on that...
While listening to some guy, he came to the conclusion, "This guy's an asshole! No wait... He's full of shit!"
Personally Will, I pity the poor schlub who is actually both (see ML umpires), even though sometimes, especially literally, such instances are simultaneously quite accurate for all of us! I certainly hope your asshole doesn't remain full of shit for too long. That most dangerous situation might be misconstrued as a religious experience or... "Holy shit!"
: )