Word: catcher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...baseman has a notion to slip behind him. The pitcher has a notion to pick him off, but he delivers to the plate where the batter swings to protect the runner who decides to go now, and the second baseman braces himself to make the tag if only the catcher can rise to the occasion and put a low, hard peg inside...
Always it comes down to the fundamental confrontation of pitcher and batter, with the catcher involved as the only player who faces the field and sees the whole game; he presides as a masked god squatting. The pitcher's role is slyer than the batter's, but the batter's is more human. The pitcher plays offense and defense simultaneously. He labors to tempt and to deceive. The batter cannot know what is coming. He can go down swinging or looking and be made to look the fool. Yet he has a bat in his hands. And if all goes...
...just which adolescent Bill Clinton really wants to be: it turns out he is Holden Caulfield. Near the end of J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst, which Hillary Clinton bought a copy of during the Clintons' 1993 summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Caulfield explains what the "catcher in the rye" means...
...catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean, if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher...
...woman distance swimmer the world has ever seen is lean and serene these days, digging cheerfully just now into her between-workouts morning diet supplement of--yes, cholesterol enthusiasts--hash-brown potatoes. And a fried egg, over easy. And a couple of griddle cakes, each the size of a catcher's mitt. All of which will jiggle around the middle of her breakfast companion, who's having the same. But in the white-hot furnace that drives Janet Evans, it will burn to ash well before her three hours of afternoon tank time are finished and her daily weight-room...