Free Imponderables: Fun and Games by David Feldman

National Basketball Association professionals prefer the narrow-channel seams, while many amateurs, particularly young people with small hands, use wide-channel seams.

IN BASEBALL SCORING, WHY IS THE LETTER “K” CHOSEN TO DESIGNATE A STRIKEOUT?
     
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    L loyd Johnson, ex-executive director of the Society for American Baseball Research, led us to the earliest written source for this story, Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player , a manual published in 1867 that explained how to set up a baseball club. Included in Beadle’s are such quaint by-laws as “Any member who shall use profane language, either at a meeting of the club, or during field exercise, shall be fined _____ cents.”
    A chapter on scoring, written by Henry Chadwick, assigns meaning to ten letters:
     
    A for first base
B for second base
C for third base
H for home base
F for catch on the fly
D for catch on the bound
L for foul balls
T for tips
K for struck out
R for run out between bases
     
    Chadwick advocated doubling up these letters to describe more events:
     
    H R for home runs
L F for foul ball on the fly
T F for tip on the fly
T D for tip on the bound
     
    He recognized the difficulty in remembering some of these abbreviations and attempted to explain the logic:
     
    The above, at first sight, would appear to be a complicated alphabet to remember, but when the key is applied it will be at once seen that a boy could easily impress it on his memory in a few minutes. The explanation is simply this—we use the first letter in the words, Home, Fly, and Tip and the last in Bound, Foul, and Struck, and the first three letters of the alphabet for the first three bases.
     
    We can understand why the last letters in “Bound” and “Foul” were chosen—the first letters of each were already assigned a different meaning—but we can’t figure out why “S” couldn’t have stood for struck out.
    Some baseball sources have indicated that the “S” was already “taken” by the sacrifice, but we have no evidence to confirm that sacrifices were noted in baseball scoring as far back as the 1860s.
     
    Submitted by Darin Marrs of Keller, Texas.

HOW DO FOOTBALL OFFICIALS MEASURE FIRST DOWN YARDAGE WITH CHAINS, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY GO ON FIELD TO CONFIRM FIRST DOWNS?
     
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    I n professional football, careers and millions of dollars can rest on a matter of inches. We’ve never quite figured out how football officials can spot the ball accurately when a running back dives atop a group of ten hulking linemen, let alone how the chain crew retains the proper spot on the sidelines and then carries the chain back out to the field without losing its bearings. Is the aura of pinpoint measurement merely a ruse?
    Not really. The answer to this Imponderable focuses on the importance of an inexpensive metal clip. The National Football League’s Art McNally explains:
     
    If at the start of a series the ball was placed on the 23-yard line in the middle of the field, the head linesman would back up to the sideline and, after sighting the line of the ball, would indicate to a member of the chain crew that he wanted the back end of the down markers to be set at the 23-yard line. Obviously, a second member of the chain crew would stretch the forward stake to the 33-yard line.
     Before the next down is run, one of the members of the chain crew would take a special clip and place that on the chain at the back end of the 25-yard line. In other words, the clip is placed on the five-yard marker that is closest to the original location of the ball.
     When a measurement is about to be made, the head linesman picks up the chain from the 25-yard line and the men holding the front end of the stakes all proceed onto the field. The head linesman places the clip on the back end of the 25-yard line. The front stake is extended to its maximum and the referee makes the decision as to whether or not the ball has extended beyond the forward stake.
     
    Thus the