Louisville slugger

Although I am of the opinion that much of the country music is quite silly with trucks and whiskey, it seems that listening to country music on the radio did teach me something new about the great American tradition of baseball.

Lately, I've been hearing the term Louisville slugger on almost every country music song that I hear. Well, not almost every song, I exaggerate, I've heard it in two songs. One is by Mary Chopin Carpenter whose title I forget, the song goes something like "sometimes you're the Louisville slugger, sometimes you're the ball." And the other song is by an artist whose name I cannot remember, nor can I remember the title, but it is about jilted lover smashing the tricked-up four-wheel-drive that belongs to the guy who dumped her.

Initially, when I'd heard the Mary Chopin song, I figured she was referring to the nickname of some famous baseball player, and since I'm not at all interested in baseball (even though I like cricket very much, and the Cricket world cup starts soon!), I left it at that.

But then when I heard the lyrics about hitting a four-wheel-drive with Louisville slugger, I'd to wonder - it would take a woman of extraordinary strength to be able to wield a baseball player. Now to the feminists out there, I'm not trying to be chauvinistic and saying that women can never do that, I'm just saying it is weird. Now, putting aside the question of Louisville slugger, one must wonder if she was arrested for vandalizing someone else's property.

So using my amazing powers of scientific reasoning and deduction (after all I've a PhD, never mind I got that because the department ran out of funding and had to send me off with a PhD so as to not mar their good graduation record) I figured out that they must be talking about a baseball bat. Yeah, it was a clever piece of deductive reasoning that led me to conclude that the sport must be baseball because of the word slugger. Genius, huh?

Once at work, I consulted the omniscient Google, and I'm enlightened. Louisville slugger is a famous baseball bat which have been used in US games since 1884, and is apparently the Official Baseball Bat of MLB.

Coming to think of it, it was a good thing that I wasn't quizzed on this sport by my father-in-law as a part of the approval process to marry his daughter. Phew!