The above terms all designate a number of strikeouts. A hat trick is clear: derived from hockey’s great achievement of scoring three goals in a game, it means (ironically) a batter has struck out 3 times in a game.
Now, is the term for 4 K’s in a game a “sombrero”? And five a “golden sombrero”? I’ve heard “Horn” used for some ungodly number of K’s–would that be 6? (Did Sam Horn, after whom it was presumably named, ever strike out six times in a game?) And finally does 7 K’s in a game (nearly impossible, except in an extra inning game, I suppose) designate the “Horn of Plenty”? I think I heard the Horn of Plenty mentioned in this context, but am not sure if it was a joke at Sam Horn’s expense, or what. Has anyone ever come close to 7 k’s in any game?
I’ve been listening to baseball for 50+ years. Maybe not so much lately. But I don’t remember the announcer saying that a player who struck out for the third time in a game had performed a “hat trick.”
Where do you live, and what announcer have you heard using these terms?
Not so. The term comes from cricket, and only later it was adopted to other sports.
This etymology explains how it would be usable term for another sports similar to cricket.
In football, too, the term is always used nowadays when some player manages to score three goals in one game, but curiously for the higher achievements there aren’t any similar phrases, probably because those are so rare to occur. It’s always just “four goals” etc.
New York City, Sam. “Hat trick” is very common–here’s a Wikipedia cite:
Actually, googling “hat trick” and the other terms gave me a pretty good (if confusing) answer to my question about nomenclature–seems that if people make up definitions, they’re going to vary a bit.
A sombrero is a big hat, so its use for a hat trick + 1 doesn’t seem surprising. Same with golden sombrero for five Ks. However, I’ve never actually heard any of these terms used in context.
I think that these terms as applied to baseball are rather recent(the last twenty years).
I can only find “Golden Sombrero” in print in newspapers since 1987, and that was Pete Rose saying that it was a “hat trick plus 1–four strikeouts in the game.” Pete musta been confused.
“Hat trick” is first cited in baseball from the early 1950’s, but at that time it referred to a player hitting for the cycle:single, double, triple, and home run in the same game.
It almost sounds like this application to baseball is a product of something that SportsCenter announcers invented in the 1980’s and later.
