Watching the Twins on Monday (we do NOT speak of yesterday's game), I was introduced to the term domeball, which I've also seen written as Domeball, dome ball, and even (!) 'domeball.

This seems to have at least two relevant senses. First and foremost: "baseball as played at the Metrodome." Example:

If you're a baseball purist and just can't endure domeball, parlorball, studioball, or whatever you want to call that strange game played indoors on a carpet, then head outdoors to Saint Paul's Midway Stadium. [cite]

(I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that this sense is applied to baseball games at other domed stadiums.)

The second sense is the one I intially encountered: "a fly ball that is hard to see because the ceiling and the baseball look too similar." This sense seems to be less common in print, but here's an example:

Inside-the-park homer, my ass. Anyone who knows a thing about the game knows it was a single and three base error. This was not a domeball like that over Milton Bradley's head Tuesday; it was a fielding error, plain and simple. [cite]

I also found a Star Tribune article with some interesting Twins factoids. I remember hearing before about the Baggie, our version of the Green Monster, but I hadn't realized that nowadays the Twins play on FieldTurf, not AstroTurf.

(Or Astroturf, as that Trib article would have it. Maybe some stubborn copy editor is still fighting the good fight against internal caps?)

I plan to watch a lot of baseball this season, so here's hoping that I run into some other interesting lingo. Double-Tongued Word Wrestler has already assembled a nice collection of somewhat obscure baseball terms.

Labels: dialect, vocab