Ever wondered where the term 'walk-off' comes from? The Cut4 Trivia Team is on the case
Where does the term 'walk-off' come from?
The walk-off. It's one of the most ecstatic plays in baseball, associated with scenes of pure joy: the mob at home plate, the eruption of the crowd, the, uh, bucket of celebratory filth. But according to the man who coined it, he definitely didn't mean intend for it to be positive.
''It was always walkoff piece," Dennis Eckersley told the Boston Globe. "Like something you would hang in an art gallery. The walkoff piece is a horrible piece of art."
The Hall of Fame reliever invented a whole new baseball lexicon for himself (Peter Gammons once referred to it as a "DialEck"). The first reference to "walk-off," though, came in a July 30, 1988 story in the Gannett News Service: "''In Dennis Eckersley's colorful vocabulary, a walkoff piece is a home run that wins the game and the pitcher walks off the mound."
It was only intended to describe a pitcher's dejected walk off the field after giving up a game-losing home run. And, because the Baseball Gods are not without a sense of irony, just a few months later Eck found himself part of one of the game's first official walk-offs:
