Re: shortstop
If I recall correctly some old dictionaries said “shortstop” came from cricket. Does cricket have a shortstop? Did it once have one?
In Cricket, you have a “pitch” which is where the batter stands on one side and the bowler (pitcher) stands on the other. (Actually batters stand on both sides. I never really understood it). About 30 yards out, there’s a boundary line that separates out the “inner field” from the “outer field”. About another 30 to 50 yards in the boundary of the field.
In Cricket, if a fielder is standing on the boundary between the inner and outer fields, and is standing behind the batter, they are said to be playing “short”. However, they are usually called the “Short Man” or “Short Leg” because the players are normally called the “Third Man” or “Fine Leg” when playing their normal positions.
There is one more position called the “Long Stop”. This fielder stands at the very edge of the field directly behind the player. It is possible that if this player moved to the boundary of the inner field, they’d be called a “Short Stop”.
Most of this is from memory when I was in England a few decades ago and watched a cricket match. I don’t know about the game now, but back then the games really took forever to play. I was there for about five hours and left before the game was up. Maybe if I knew more about the game, I’d appreciate it a bit better. I will tell you one thing: After that experience, I will never, ever call Baseball a “slow game” again.
Well, traditional cricket matches are intended to run two days. But there are also fast-game alternate rules. Anyway, the play tempo is comparable to baseball.
(I’ve been reading Little Women lately. I had no idea how popular cricket used to be in the USA. And rounders [approximately baseball, and baseball’s ancestor] is much more popular in the UK than Americans realize.)
qazwart has the basic gist of the cricket situation, and I agree that cricket is probably the source of the term. The wikipedia Fielding (cricket) article includes a useful diagram illustrating how the nomenclature works. Essentially how fielders are positioned in relation to the batsman are described by both the angle and the distance they are from the batsman.
The old longstop position was directly behind the batsman on the boundary. As wicketkeepers now cover this area fairly well this position is redundant at all except the most lowly levels of the game (usually seen only in children’s games to back up an inexperienced or incompetant wicketkeeper). So a short stop in cricket terminology would be a fielder some 10-20 metres directly behind the batsman.
The closest cricket position analogous to baseball’s shortstop would be Mid-wicket, positioned some 45 degrees to the right and 15-20 metres away from a right-handed batsman. Short Mid-wicket is probably be too close (around 10 or less metres away) to be a real equivalent. A fielding captain may occasionally place a fielder at silly mid-on or silly mid-off - only a couple of metres away from the batsman.
Just a quick note about the art of placing fields. The fielding side has only nine fielders available (11 minus the bowler and the wicket-keeper) so the captain and the bowler must choose where to place their fielders in order to take as many wickets as possible and reduce the number of runs scored. This requires an ability to predict which shots the batsmen will play and for the bowler to be able to bowl a line and length that suits the field set. This plays a major part in all forms of the game.