The Trolley Dodger

I ran across a phrase in an article on a member of the soccer club I’ve adopted as favorite, Bohemian FC of Dublin:

It may have taken some time for the 21-year-old [Conor Powell] to break his duct, but he has become such a notable regular in the starting eleven that supporters would be forgiven for thinking that he already had a few goals under his belt.

From a quick Google, it looks to be a typo for “break his duck,” as in duck’s egg, as in nought or zero — what we’d refer to as a goose egg.

It’s originally a 19th-century cricket term, e.g. “break his duck’s egg” meaning to score at last. Michael Quinion says:

It’s not as cruel as it sounds. It’s not the duck that’s being broken, but a duck’s egg. These days the expression can be used in almost any game that involves a score of some sort but originally — back in Victorian times — it related solely to cricket. It seems to have been English public-school slang of the 1850s to call a score of nought against a player’s name a duck’s egg — presumably a duck rather than a chicken because a duck’s egg is bigger and more prominent.

A player who had scored, who had moved off that accusing zero on the scoreboard, was said to have broken his duck’s egg. It began to appear in print in the early 1860s and soon people shortened it just to duck. The first known example of that form appeared in the Daily News in August 1868: “You see … that his fear of a ‘duck’ — as by a pardonable contraction from duck-egg a nought is called in cricket-play — outweighs all other earthly considerations.” A batsman who was dismissed without scoring was said to be out for a duck.

Not even the hometown newspaper picked them to win. Congratulations to the Dodgers sweeping the Cardinals.

We’re excited here at Trolley Dodger HQ, but it is as subdued as the on-field celebration at Busch Stadium just now. This is only step one.

1. Pick a topic that will cause controversy. Say, Manny Ramirez’s drug suspension.
2. Come up with a gimmick to bring in the links and hits. Say, “…I’m giving my World Series tickets this year to the person who writes my favorite 50-word sermon to Ramirez.”
3. Get Bill Plaschke to ghost-write your column for you.
4. Edit Bill’s first draft to increase the moral indignation and delete some of the carriage returns.
5. Publish column and watch the hits roll in.

I would expect more out of Steve Lopez. Unfortunately, he decided to take the easy way out. Loafing his way across the outfield, as it were.

Maybe it’s the vicodin talking, but this whole scheme strikes me as insincere. If you felt that bad about buying those tickets (and somehow calculating you were supporting Manny by doing so), how about donating those tainted tickets to be auctioned off for charity? You could even make it a steroid-awareness organization if you felt like making a real statement.

Think about how much of a bigger splash you could have made by doing things that way. You’d get all kinds of press online and in the real world. Plus you’d be making a difference about a cause that you apparently care a lot about. And getting even more of those precious hits and links.

Something to mull over in the next columnist meeting.

As readers might recall from earlier in the summer, I injured my right knee in a fall on our back steps, spraining my MCL, getting a bone bruise on my femur, and partially tearing my medial meniscus. The first two items have healed in the interim, but I’ve been awaiting surgery for some months to repair the last item. Finally had that surgery yesterday, and it all went well — a partial meniscectomy removed the errant bits, and now I’m into the process of healing. It was all done arthroscopically, so that’ll make it much quicker to heal.

The doctor who performed the surgery was Dr. Christopher Jobe, a renown orthopedic surgeon in his own right, working at Loma Linda University Medical Center. But it turns out he is also the son of Dr. Frank Jobe, known to all Dodger and baseball fans as the inventor of Tommy John surgery!

This was a total coincidence, and since I was concentrating on my knee, it actually took a friend of mine (and a Rockies fan, unfortunately ;) to pose the question to me after my initial consultation with Dr. Jobe fils. Since I didn’t see the doctor while I was in a conscious state yesterday, I confirmed the relationship with one of the hospital staff — all of whom, by the way, were incredibly friendly folks, so thanks to them.

Also coincidentally, one of the other patients at the surgical center yesterday was a defensive back from (I believe) the University of Arizona. He had a torn ACL and was getting it repaired. I didn’t catch his name in my hazy state, and my Google-fu is still out of whack this morning, but I’ll keep looking and update this when I find out. I seem to remember it having gone well, if I wasn’t hallucinating in the recovery room when he was brought in.