Chinese home run

The above instances predate the earliest use that Paul Dickson found when researching The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. In a 1930 story for The Washington Post, writer Brian Bell quoted Dan Howley, manager of the Cincinnati Reds, defending the hitting prowess of Harry Heilmann, who was then finishing his career under Howley. "[They] were real home runs", Howley said, pointing out how far from the field they had landed. "They were not Chinese home runs in that short bleacher at right", referring to the back fence on the foul line at the Polo Grounds, a mere 258 feet (79 m) from home.^[2]

Dickson reiterated the results of two attempts in the 1950s to determine the term's origin, following its widespread use in stories. After Rhodes' home run, Joseph Sheehan of The New York Times made the first attempt. His research took him to Garry Schumacher, a former baseball writer then working as the Giants' press relations executive, who had himself been known for creating some baseball terms that went into wide use. Schumacher told him that he believed Tad Dorgan, a cartoonist popular in the early decades of the 20th century, had introduced it, probably in one of his widely read Indoor Sports panels.^[2][10] It has, however, been suggested that Dorgan disliked the Giants and their manager, John McGraw, which may have also given him a reason to coin a disparaging term for short home runs.^[11] (However, Lighter said in a follow-up post to the ADS listserv that he had found no evidence Dorgan coined the term, or even that the cartoonist had heard it.^[12])

During the 1910s, when Dorgan's cartoon was at its most popular, there was an ongoing debate over the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law in U.S. history to bar entry to the country on the basis of ethnicity or national origin.^[13] Chinese immigrants who had entered prior to its 1882 passage remained, however, and were often hired as "coolies", doing menial labor for low pay. "The idea was to express a cheap home run as Chinese then represented what was cheap, such as their labor", lexicographer David Shulman told Dickson.^[2] This was in keeping with a bevy of other contemporary such usages, such as calling a Ford automobile a "Chinese Rolls-Royce". Sheehan also wrote that it carried the additional "connotation of a homer of little account."^[10] He did not think that Dorgan, known for the gentleness of his satire, had meant it to be insulting, especially since he had two adopted sons from China.^[2]

In 1958, when the Giants moved to San Francisco and left the Polo Grounds, J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of The Sporting News, made another attempt to find the source of the term. He agreed with Sheehan that it had originated with Dorgan and the association of Chinese immigrants with cheap labor. However, his article was reprinted in the Los Angeles Times, and readers there wrote in with alternative suggestions.^[2]

One was from Travis McGregor, a retired San Francisco sportswriter. In his recollection, the term had been in use on the West Coast in the years just before World War I. He attributed it to a joke derived from an aspiring Chinese-American sportswriter covering minor league games in the Pacific Coast League, whom the typists at newspapers simply credited as "Mike Murphy" since they couldn't properly transcribe his name. "He had a keen sense of humor, a degree from Stanford and a great yen to be a newspaperman", McGregor wrote in his own letter to The Sporting News. As a result of his education, he spoke with no accent, but still used affected syntax. "He was a one-man show at baseball games ... for two or three seasons, an Oriental Fred Allen", according to McGregor. Once, he recalled, Murphy described one batter as "wave at ball like Mandarin with fan".^[2]

This phrase stuck in the minds of the other sportswriters in attendance and, McGregor suggested, it spread among all the league's writers, becoming a

That 1954 game is chiefly remembered today for Willie Mays' catch of a Vic Wertz fly to deep center in the eighth inning, which broke up an Indians' rally that might otherwise have led to them winning the game. It had happened because of the 483-foot (147 m) distance of the Polo Grounds' fences in that area, its other peculiarity, which offset the advantage to hitters of its short right-field fence. The Indians attributed their upset loss to the park's unusual dimensions. "The longest out and the shortest home run of the season beat us, that's all", Indians manager Al López told The Washington Post. The team was unable to recover psychologically,^[17] and the Giants swept them three games later.^[18]

Sportswriters made much humor of the "Chinese" aspect of Rhodes' home run. One newspaper's photographer posed him reading a Chinese newspaper, apparently looking for an account of his hit.^[19] The New York Times called it "more Chinese than chow mein and just as Chinese as Shanghai and Peiping".^[20]

Dick Young extended this trope the furthest in his Daily News coverage:^[3]

The story of the Giants' 5–2 win over Cleveland in yesterday's World Series opener should be written vertically, from top to bottom ... in

laundry

.

This unrestrained use of

The Giants moved from the Polo Grounds to San Francisco at the end of the 1957 season. Chinese home runs were once again a subject of discussion, with many writers recalling short shots like Thomson's and Rhodes' as a quirk of the former stadium now lost to baseball. Writing in The New York Times as spring training was underway, Gay Talese wrote that Giants' players in their new home missed the "cheap (or Chinese) home runs ... legal nonetheless".^[22]

1958–1961: Los Angeles Coliseum

Another park quickly took over the Polo Grounds' reputation for Chinese home runs. New York City's other National League team, the

As had happened with Rhodes' home run four years earlier, the Chinese-themed joking around the short fence continued. The screen was called the "Chinese screen" or the "Great Wall of China",^[23] and the Coliseum as a whole became known as "O'Malley's Chinese Theatre",^[26] "The House that Charlie Chan Built",^[27] or even, in one Willard Mullin cartoon, "Flung Wong O'Malley's Little Joss House in Los Angeles".^[2] The Sporting News, contrary to the preseason trend, editorialized that it could not yet be said that the short wall would adversely affect the game. But on the cover of that issue (which also included Spink's etymological investigation) it put a cartoon showing an outsized Chinese coolie hanging over the Coliseum's back fence.^[28][a] The Chinese American community in the Los Angeles area made its objections known.^[27]

At first the worst fears of the media appeared justified. In the first week of play at the Coliseum, 24 home runs were hit, most of them over the left field fence and screen. Chicago Cubs outfielder Lee Walls, not especially distinguished as a hitter, was responsible for three of them—in a single game. Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, who had defended the Coliseum's dimensions during the preseason, quickly proposed that a second, 60-foot (18 m) mesh screen be established in the stands at 333 feet (101 m) from the plate, with any balls that fell between the two a ground rule double; however, that turned to be impossible under earthquake-safety provisions of the Los Angeles building code.^[24]

Pitchers soon adjusted. They threw outside to right-handed hitters, requiring them to pull hard for the left-field fence, and as at the Polo Grounds, a deep fence in right center (444 feet (135 m)) challenged lefties, and over the course of the season the home run count at the Coliseum declined to the same level as other National League parks. At the end of the season, The Sporting News noted, there had been only 21 more home runs in the Coliseum than there were in the smaller Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers had played in Brooklyn.^[24] During the off-season, Frick announced a rule change stipulating that any new stadium built for major-league play must have all its fences at least 325 feet (99 m) from home plate, as Spahn had suggested. This was widely viewed as a response to the preseason controversy.^[29]

The only hitter to truly benefit from the short left-field fence was

Game 5 of

In 2008, to celebrate their 50th anniversary in Los Angeles, the Dodgers played a preseason exhibition game at the Coliseum against the Boston Red Sox, losing by a score of 7–1. The wire mesh screen was restored, this time at the 60-foot (18 m) height Frick had sought because an additional section of seats had been added there since 1959, shortening left field to 201 feet (61 m). A Dodgers executive noted that it mimicked the Green Monster in left field at Fenway Park, the Red Sox' home field.^[24]

1962–1963: Return of the Polo Grounds

In 1962, baseball returned to the Polo Grounds when the National League created the New York Mets as an expansion team, to replace the Giants and Dodgers. The new team used the old stadium for two seasons while Shea Stadium was built out in the Queens neighborhood of Flushing. The Mets lost the franchise's first six games at the Giants' former home, on their way to a 40–120 record, still the most losses in a major-league season, but in those games they and their opponents hit ten home runs apiece. Sportswriters took notice, and one AP writer picked up where Dick Young had left off eight years before: "So solly, honorable sir. Chinese home run not buried in Coliseum. Making big comeback in honorable ancient Polo Grounds".^[31]

While the team's poor play and last-place finishes in its two seasons in the Polo Grounds left few individual home runs over the right-field fence to become the subject of popular comment and mockery as Rhodes' had, the term was still in use during the team's radio broadcasts, as Yale professor Dana Brand recalled in his 2007 memoir, Mets Fan:

If you hit a 300-foot home run in the Polo Grounds,

Bob Murphy would call it a Chinese home run. Obviously, they wouldn't call it a Chinese home run now, even if you could still hit a 300-foot home run. To this day, I don't know what made a home run like this Chinese. Was it because it was short, something a small person could hit? Was there some implication that it was tricky or cheap or sneaky? What a strange world that was.^[32]

Use of the term largely faded out afterwards, and it was seen as offensive. In 1981 San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen criticized Oakland A's radio announcer Bill King for saying a Bobby Murcer shot was "not a Chinese home run". Caen called the remark "racist" and wrote: "I'm sure he has heard from militant Oriental groups, all of which hit hard".^[2]

That sentiment was revived in 2015 when