Sign up for The Media Today, CJRâs daily newsletter.
The World Series is fast approaching, and many of the teams in the playoffs are hoping for at least one âwalkoffâ victory. Thatâs where the home team takes the lead in the bottom of the ninth inning or later, and the game abruptly ends. Itâs a good thing, because it means the team has triumphed over a tie or has come from behind at the last minute. A âwalkoffâ home run is particularly welcome.
But âwalkoffsâ (also spelled âwalk offsâ or âwalk-offsâ) have not always been so joyful. They used to signal failure, particularly by a relief pitcher.
The term may have been coined in 1988 by Dennis Eckersley, then a reliever for the Oakland Athletics. During the season, Eckersley spoke frequently of the times a visiting pitcher lost the game at the last minute. As he put it in one article: âOn the road, when you give up a game-winning home run you have to walk off. Iâd forgotten how terrible that feels because I havenât had to do it in a while.â
During the World Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers that year, when Eckersley gave up a two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth inning, one sportswriter noted: âDennis Eckersley has his own description for what Kirk Gibson did to him in Game 1. He calls them âwalk-off pieces.â You donât look back, you walk off the mound and you wait for a new day because the old one has been ripped to pieces.â
Through the early nineties, the term was usually associated with Eckersley, always connoting failure and embarrassment. But in the mid-nineties, the âwalkoff homerâ appeared, switching the focus from the pitcher to the batter. Though the term was used relatively infrequently, âwalkoffâ homers begat âwalkoffâ triples, which begat âwalkoffâ doubles … even âwalkoffâ walks. By 2009, the term âwalkoffâ was being applied to virtually any game that ended in the bottom of an inningâroughly half of them.
So how did an unhappy term become a happy one, and so common?
Sorry, no answers here. Itâs a mystery, more so because the winners of a home game are unlikely to be âwalking offâ anyway â they will run, jump, leap, or gambol from the dugout to greet the victorious runner as he reaches home. It is the pitcher on the mound and his teammates who will âwalk off,â heads held low. But no one is looking at them.
If anyone has ideas on how Eckersleyâs disgrace became the home teamâs triumph, please share them by writing languagecorner@cjr.org.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.