What Fresh Mel
For Opening Day, a heckling investigation
Dear All,
This is the latest episode of Don’t Press That Button, a newsletter about books and music and movies and cats and baseball and whatnot. As the name would indicate, we are very cautious about buttons around here. Buttons are tempting, but so are a lot of things.
Luckily, the button below is safe. All it will do is subscribe you to this newsletter.
Polo Grounds First Bagger, Three Letters
First of all, my apologies for the long gap between newsletters. I’ve been hard at work. Besides, the cat keeps bringing me her stick with the ribbon attached and that’s cut into my newslettering time.
A few nights ago, however, something I read in Joe Posnanski’s (delightful) The Baseball 100 sent me on a journey that seemed too important not to share. It started with Posnanski’s Mel Ott chapter.
While most of you probably know Mel Ott because of the federal law that requires he be used as an answer in half of all crossword puzzles, he was also a heck of a ballplayer. Ott delighted New York fans for 21 years, from 1926 to 1947, and pounded a still remarkable 511 homers along the way. Posnanski takes a fascinating deep dive into the statistics to show how Master Melvin radically altered his approach away from the Polo Grounds, hitting for doubles instead of homers. (Here’s Mel taking his batting practice licks in 1934. That’s a big hitch!)
But what really sent me spinning was a question that braced me out of the blue, a question that many others have doubtless asked themselves: did hecklers ever call Mel Ott “Mel Snot”?
I checked my tableside dictionary — The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary — and learned that snot derives from the Old English gesnot and corresponds with the Middle Dutch word, snotte, which is just fun to look at. I also picked up an excellent new definition of snot: “the snuff or burnt wick of a candle.”
Meanwhile, the online Merriam-Webster specifically dates snot to the 15th century! So, we are dealing with a word that has been in use for a long, long time, since way before Mel Ott took the field for the New York Giants in 1926.
Which means that, yes, it is possible that hecklers called him Mel Snot. Remember, too, that the Giants played in the same division as the Phillies, where the fans are all actual lunatics. In Philly, calling him Mel Snot would be going easy on him.
I moved over to The New York Times and gleefully searched their database for the word snot. I’m surely not the first to do this, but I might be the first over the age of 13 to do it. How many hits do you suppose I got? 1,5121! That’s a lot of snot!
The oldest entry, printed October 16, 1852, titillated. SEDUCER SNOT. How badly was the Seducer snotted, and by whom? Unfortunately, the article hadn’t been transcribed.
Nine years later in 1861, a declaration by traitor Jefferson Davis seemed to provide another new definition of snot. “Contracts have also been made at that city with two different establishments for the casting of ordnance, cannon, snot and shell,” boasted the famous and disgusting racist. While I dug around for information about this usage without luck, it initially seemed fair to assume that the snot he was crowing about was some kind of ammunition.
Wait, though…
I wondered, was it possible the Times just had some long-running issue with transcribers typing snot when they intended to type shot? After all, the H and the N are close enough on the keyboard to borrow a little flour from one another. That would explain why my attempts to find a definition that included ammunition had been a bust, and help us better understand what happened to the Seducer of 1852.
Most of the next few snots seemed military-related, and an eye-catching dispatch from March 29, 1902, confirmed my suspicion.
In the transcribed article itself, Banny Stevack, 23, is reported to have been captured by IRS agents at a carpentry shop at 123rd St. that seemed to be operating as an illegal distillery. Banny — and what else was the man supposed to do but become a bootlegger with that name? — attempted to flee and was halted in his tracks by “two shots close to his head from Col. Thompson’s revolver.” 1) I hate Col. Thompson’s police work here. Don’t fire at unarmed suspects. 2) Shots makes a lot more sense than snots.
Then, I discovered that it was possible to click through to a close-up PDF scan of the original newsprint and see the actual headline and article:
There you have it. The headline word was Shots not Snots.
I circled back to the Seducer article and checked out the close-up of the PDF there. Here’s the actual story in its entirety, and it’s a doozy:
Yesterday, a woman, named Ann Wheeler, formerly of Cleveland, where her friends reside, shot a young man named LACE in the street, with a pistol. LACE, who is a married man, had seduced her, and reported the fact in the saloons of the city.
Let me repeat: it’s bad to shoot people — even that asshole LACE.
Whoever transcribed The New York Times of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a typo issue with the word shot that periodically blew up in their faces. No criticism here. The print on these old papers is teeny tiny, and I bet the transcribers weren’t exactly being paid big bucks.2
Farther along, the Times’s snot files did unveil a more convincing definition of the word in a July 6, 1913, article about crabbing. Here, a snot is “[a crab] that has just entered the shedding stage.” I once again struggled to unearth this definition anywhere else. However, the scan is clear and that’s definitely snot in the newspaper column. It rings incredibly true as a piece of fishing vernacular, doesn’t it?
Snot trickles in and out of the paper of record. It disappears entirely, for instance, from 1903 to 1908, 1914—1915, and 1925—1928. Was the crabbing usage the only seemingly intentional one? And what about Mel Ott?
I clicked a little more and…
I won’t leave you in suspense. There is no mention in this wonderful article about anybody calling Mel Ott “Mel Snot.” Instead, snot shows up again as a typo, this time for spot. The sentence is “Now the moment a spot of dust3 or grass stain appears on white leather surface the umpire throws it out.” The article itself is a grump special about how baseball fans these days — in 1929, that is — “yell for less finesse and more slugging” — and Ott features as the season’s current leader in homers. Not only is the point of view one you could find today, it’s one I hold myself! Enough with the homers, let’s throw it around and slide and stuff.
It then struck me that most of the articles4 were eerily familiar: the shooting, the scumbag boasting about his war machines, the dangerous arrest. That depressed me, frankly.
Anyway, etymology is fun. History is interesting. And whatever they said about him, Mel Ott blew his nose on the naysayers, those utter snottes, and now lives among the immortals in Cooperstown.
The Latest
As I mentioned above, I’ve been hard at work writing new things in order to fill up this part of the newsletter down the line. I do have a couple of introductions, a couple of stories, and Self Help: Lie Another Day already in the pipeline. Nothing on those today, alas.
What I can tell you is that the German paperback of The Curator, aka Die Kuratorin, is now available. As you can see, the good folks at Buchheim Verlag have outdone themselves again!
Recommendations
I was not lying when I proclaimed that the Paranoid Style’s Known Associates was their best album yet. No less an authority than NPR agrees with me, and you can listen for yourself on the streaming medium of your choice, though Bandcamp is best.
Watch the excellent thriller Dead of Winter on HBO Max, starring Emma Thompson and featuring a scene-stealing turn from Judy Greer.
In Finland, Dead of Winter is Sydäntalvi. Read this outstanding, moving essay by Amanda Peet at the New Yorker.
Subscribe to my dear friend Jerry Rocha’s Substack. Jerry is one of the world’s funniest, nicest people, and he has a story to tell.
Attend a No Kings protest this Saturday. While you’re at it, make sure your voter registration is up to date.
As ever, if you have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I also have a chat here on Substack, and a modest amount of chatting sometimes occurs. I’m over on Bluesky and Threads and Instagram, too, if you’d like to follow along at any of those places, although I’m not super active. If you’d like to purchase a signed copy of one of my books, Oblong Books has a selection and they are always happy to mail them.
All Best,
Owen
In the period between the writing of my original draft and official DPTB editor Jen’s pass, this number jumped to 1,513! Fast moving situation here! Snot building up.
Major criticism if it wasn’t a human that did the transcribing. If it was a machine, fuck that poorly performing machine, and replace it with a human being who won’t confuse with shot with snot.
I have to admit that the incorrect transcription, “snot of dust,” is evocative.
Except the one about crabbing.