Stefan Fatsis, “These Sports Terms Should Be Playable in Scrabble” (Slate, Lexicon Valley blog, Mar. 18, 2014)
Wall Street Journal language columnist Ben Zimmer suggests several baseball terms.Gyroball had a short, mysterious, overblown life as the secret pitch of Japanese import Daisuke Matsuzaka. Hitterish has been attributed all the way back to Babe Ruth. (If you remove an H you get SHITTIER, which isn’t in the OSPD because it’s an offensive term but is playable in club and tournament Scrabble, which allows a set of words—known as the Poo List—banned from the over-the-counter dictionary in the 1990s).
Zimmer also offers eephus, junkball, ribbie, and squibber. An S-A-B-R front-hook for METRICS is overdue. As are the one-word adjectives leftfield, rightfield, and centerfield, and their nounal -ER extensions. Loogy, an acronym for Lefty One Out GuY, deserves a spot in the lexical lineup. As does its homonym, loogie, the viscous ball of expectorant released by many a ballplayer, possibly derived from Lou Gehrig’s name (though that seems dubious).
Read the rest here.