NYC sports fans: about the "Gints"

[Espee]

Long ago I read a story, set in the forties, maybe earlier, in which some New York baseball fans were discussing "the Gints."
I thought about it for a while, and decided that with author deleting the 'a' (and of course, the G pronounced as J) the name "Gints" should rhyme with "pints." Just a quick, sloppy way of saying the word, skipping a vowel along the way.
Later, I heard-- possibly in a low-budget or amateur stage play-- some New York characters boosting "the Gints"-- but they said it to rhyme with "splints."
I expect these actors were westerners (well, so am I!) but I have it right, right? And they had it wrong, right?
And of course, this isn't necessarily a vintage question. There are still New York Giants in the National Football League.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was "Jints" as in "splints," spelled with a "J," as most often used by the New York Daily News as an abbreviation in headlines. Thus, any New Yorker glancing at a newsstand and seeing "FLOCK BEATS JINTS" would know that Brooklyn had beaten the Giants.

 

[dhermann1]

The New York baseball Giants predated the football giants by many decades. People forget, but the Giants were really the most popular baseball team in New York for most of the first half of the 20th century. They had stars like the great picther Christy Matthewson and the outfielder Mel Ott. Their great manager, John J. McGraw, is considered the man who "wrote the book" on baseball, in other words, he codified for the first time the correct way to play various positions and how to act in various situations.
They played in a stadium in upper Manhattan known as the Polo Grounds.
According to legend, they got their team name from president Grover Cleveland. When the team visited him at the White House, he exclaimed, "They are giants!"
They moved to San Francisco in 1958, in a move that broke the hearts of their fans every bit as much as the same move did to the Brooklyn Dodger fans, who lost their team to Los Angeles in that same year.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

They moved to San Francisco in 1958, in a move that broke the hearts of their fans every bit as much as the same move did to the Brooklyn Dodger fans, who lost their team to Los Angeles in that same year.

I assume that it's pretty much the same with the Giants but to this day I occasionally encounter hard-core Dodger fans who still refer to Brooklyn, not L.A., when talking about "their" Dodgers. lol

 

[LizzieMaine]

"It wasn't just the relocation of a franchise -- it was the total destruction of a culture."
Brooklyn fan Joe Flaherty, quoted by Peter Golenbock in "Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers."

"I feel sorry for the kids of New York, but I haven't seen too many of their fathers at the Polo Grounds lately."
-- Giants owner Horace Stoneham.

That excuse might have washed for poor old Horace, but the Dodgers were, by far, the most profitable franchise in the National League in 1957, with a gigantic radio/TV contract which more than offset any sag in ballpark attendance. Revisionists can blame Robert Moses all they want, but the fact remains that Walter O'Malley was making plenty of money in Brooklyn. He just wanted to make *more.*

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

I wish the O'Malleys still owned the Dodgers because now the franchise is in the middle of what amounts to a custody battle between divorcing owners Frank and Jamie McCourt.

 

[dhermann1]

One issue regarding the Dodgers was that the team wanted to own (i.e. build with their own money, what a concept!) their stadium. There were a couple of schemes. One involved a domed stadium next to the Atlantic Terminal, in the heart of downtown Brooklyn, exactly on the spot where the new basketball arena is going up. Another was to build the same dome over the Sunnyside Yards, in Queens. The design for that dome essentially became the Astrodome in Houston just a couple years later.
The city was dead set on building a CITY owned stadium. That scheme eventually became Shea Stadium, named after mover and shaker lawyer, Bill Shea.
Shea Stadium was much maligned as a sports facility. It was really terrible for football, but I, even as a Yankee fan, always enjoyed Shea a lot. Darn shame it's gone.

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://...EQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNG_x2ZfMH_yQa8fvYpU9ov-A2Q4nA

 

[LizzieMaine]

Probably the best book ever written about the departure of the Dodgers and Giants is "After Many A Summer," by Robert Murphy. I think it'll stand for a long time as the definitive account of what happened and why -- there's an awful lot in it about the weaseling and backstage manipulations of Robert Moses, Mayor Wagner, the various borough presidents, and other New York politicians, but in the end Walter O'Malley emerges -- as people have argued all along -- as the main villian of the piece.

Horace Stoneham, however, was not, as many people have claimed, a blank-eyed dupe suckered by The O'Malley into moving west, where he proceeded to lose his shirt. Stoneham had been planning to leave New York as far back as 1955 -- when Robert Moses began pushing to take over the Polo Grounds site for a low-income housing development, and he had already made up his mind to move to Minneapolis when O'Malley convinced him to give San Francisco a try instead. O'Malley was watching out for his own interests more than Stoneham's here -- he knew the Dodger-Giant rivalry would die if the two teams were split up, and it was a pretty important part of his bottom line, so it had to be preserved at all costs. If Stoneham was a boob at all, it was in thinking O'Malley ever had anyone's interests in mind but his own.

 

[Espee]

Back to the word for a moment-- why would people turn jy-ants into jints-which-rhymes-with-splints? Are there other words which receive a similar distortion?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think it was invented as a headline abbreviation by New York's tabloid papers in the twenties -- I've not seen any references to it being used in slang prior to the twenties, not even during the Giants' glory days in the teens. The tabs needed a short, quick word that wouldn't take up too much space and yet would communicate the meaning at the slightest glance. It probably started out as GI'NTS, which is the sort of thing you'd expect to see on the back page of the News or the Mirror sports final when space was tight, but JINTS was even easier to read at a distance.

FLOCK as an abbreviation for the Dodgers comes from the twenties as well -- they were the Brooklyn Robins then, managed by Uncle Wilbert Robinson, and Robins come in a Flock. It became such a popular term that long after Robinson died and the team name was changed back to Dodgers, the tabloids insisted on using FLOCK in headlines. (BUMS didn't become popular in headlines until the forties and fifties, and FLOCK continued in use right up until the Dodgers left town.)

 

[LizzieMaine]

The city was dead set on building a CITY owned stadium. That scheme eventually became Shea Stadium, named after mover and shaker lawyer, Bill Shea.

Interesting fact: in the early 1930's, the Brooklyn Trust Company, which held the mortgage on Ebbets Field, and represented the feuding heirs of the Ebbets and McKeever families, which owned the team, had two young lawyers on staff. The financial condition of the ball club was such that the bank felt it necessary to appoint an official representative to the team's Board of Directors to represent its interests. The young lawyer who was chosen was Walter F. O'Malley. The other young lawyer was William A. Shea.

Had Shea been appointed to that seat over O'Malley, history would have unfolded very differently. The Dodgers would never have left New York -- some time in the early sixties, they would have moved from Ebbets Field to the new municipal stadium in Queens, and would either still be there today or playing at newly built stadium in Brooklyn, likely at the Coney Island site where the Cyclones now play. The Giants would be playing in Minneapolis. The Washington Senators would have moved to Los Angeles by 1960, where Harmon Killebrew would have taken full advantage of Wrigley Field's short porches and would have broken Babe Ruth's single season home run record his first season there. The Kansas City Athletics would have moved to the Bay Area nearly a decade before they actually did. And the baseball expansion of 1961-62 wouldn't have happened -- meaning the Angels, Texas Rangers, Mets, and Astros wouldn't exist. The Milwaukee Braves would likely have moved to Los Angeles instead of Atlanta, as the National League's representative in the market, and the Cincinnati Reds might very well have moved to San Francisco/Oakland.

All that, just because William Shea happened to be standing around the office one day in 1933 instead of Walter O'Malley. Pity it didn't work out that way.