Expand your vocabulary and win friends with these international baseball terms

Though you may not realize it, baseball is a shifting language unto itself. As the game and the culture changes, so too do the phrases used to describe it. According to The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, the first time a comfortable lead was referred to as a "cushion" was by the Chicago Herald in 1891. The first time a writer referred to a fastball's cutting action was in 1912. Hell, before Dave Niehaus, we didn't even know to call a grand slam a "grand salami." Now those are terms which we use almost daily to describe the game we love. 

Which is why I take so much glee in learning some of the words that baseball's European ballplayers use. With former players like Steve Finley and Barry Larkin on-hand at the MLB Elite Camp in Tirrenia, Italy, a program that develops and produces continental baseball talent, the European players offered up some of their language's best baseball words. 

So the next time you see a pitcher, you could go Croatian and call them a "bacač." Or you could pretend to be in Italy and call a home run a "Fuoricampo." Or, my personal favorite, from the Honkbalers themselves, a bunt play is called a "stootslag." 

From now on, I shall only refer to bunts as "stootslags."