Chinese home run, also a Chinese homer, Harlem home run, Polo home run, or Pekinese poke, is a derogatory and archaic baseball term for a hit that just barely clears the outfield fence at its closest distance to home plate. It is essentially the shortest home run possible in the ballpark in question, particularly if the park has an atypically short fence. The term was most commonly used in reference to home runs hit along the right field foul line at the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants, where that distance was short even by contemporary standards. When the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, the Los Angeles Coliseum, temporary home of the newly relocated Los Angeles Dodgers, gained the same reputation for four seasons until the team took up residence in its permanent home at Dodger Stadium in 1962. Following two seasons of use by the expansion New York Mets in the early 1960s, the Polo Grounds were demolished, and the term gradually dropped out of use.
Why these home runs were called "Chinese" is not definitely known, but it is believed to have reflected an early 20th-century perception that Chinese immigrants to the United States did the menial labor they were consigned to with a bare minimum of adequacy, and were content with minimal reward for it. A Tad Dorgan cartoon has been proposed as the likely origin, but that has not been proven; the earliest known usages are in a 1927 newspaper account of a Pittsburgh Pirates–Philadelphia Phillies major-league game, and in a 1919 newspaper account of a Los Angeles Angels–Sacramento Senators minor-league game. In the 1950s, an extended take on the term in the New York Daily News led the city's Chinese-American community to ask sportswriters not to use it. This perception of ethnic insensitivity has further contributed to its disuse.
It has been used to disparage not only the hit but the batter, since it implies minimal effort on his part. Giants' outfielder Mel Ott, who hit many such home runs in the Polo Grounds during his career, was a frequent target of this as his physique and unusual batting stance were not those associated with a power hitter. The hit most frequently recalled as a Chinese home run was the three-run pinch hit walk-off shot by Dusty Rhodes that won the first game of the 1954 World Series for the Giants on their way to a sweep of the Cleveland Indians.
A secondary meaning, which continues today, is of a foul ball that travels high and far, often behind home plate. However, this appears to be confined to sandlot and high-school games in New England. Research into this usage suggests that it may not, in fact, have had anything initially to do with Chinese people, but is instead a corruption of "Chaney's home run", from a foul by a player of that name which supposedly won a game when the ball thus hit, the only one remaining, could not be found.
Etymology
As early as the late 19th century, baseball players and fans had recognized that parks with shorter distances to the foul poles and back fence allowed for home runs that were regarded as undeserved or unearned, since fly balls of the same distance hit closer to or in center field could easily be caught for outs. In 1896, Jim Nolan of The Daily News of Galveston, Texas, reporting on the expansion of the local ballpark, wrote: "The enlarged size of the grounds will enable the outfielders to cover more ground and take in fly balls that went for cheap home runs before. Batsmen will have to earn their triples and home runs hereafter".
In 2010, Jonathan E. Lighter, editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, posted on the American Dialect Society's (ADS) listserv that he had found the earliest use of the term "Chinese home run" for that type of hit in a Charleroi, Pennsylvania, newspaper's 1927 account of a National League game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates: "The Phillies went into a deadlock on Cy's Chinese homer only to see the Buccos hammer over four runs a little later."
An article in the Los Angeles Times in August 1919 used the term while summarizing a minor league game in the Pacific Coast League between the Los Angeles Angels and Sacramento Senators. "Ellis hit a tremendous Chinese home run just back of Pinelli's head", sportswriter Ed O'Malley wrote, in describing a home run by the Angels' Rube Ellis that, apparently, had not been hit very far past Babe Pinelli, the Senators' third baseman.
The above instances predate the earliest use that Paul Dickson found when researching The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. In a 1930 story for The Washington Post, writer Brian Bell quoted Dan Howley, manager of the Cincinnati Reds, defending the hitting prowess of Harry Heilmann, who was then finishing his career under Howley. "[They] were real home runs", Howley said, pointing out how far from the field they had landed. "They were not Chinese home runs in that short bleacher at right", referring to the back fence on the foul line at the Polo Grounds, a mere from home.
Dickson reiterated the results of two attempts in the 1950s to determine the term's origin, following its widespread use in stories. After Rhodes' home run, Joseph Sheehan of The New York Times made the first attempt. His research took him to Garry Schumacher, a former baseball writer then working as the Giants' press relations executive, who had himself been known for creating some baseball terms that went into wide use. Schumacher told him that he believed Tad Dorgan, a cartoonist popular in the early decades of the 20th century, had introduced it, probably in one of his widely read Indoor Sports panels. It has, however, been suggested that Dorgan disliked the Giants and their manager, John McGraw, which may have also given him a reason to coin a disparaging term for short home runs. (However, Lighter said in a follow-up post to the ADS listserv that he had found no evidence Dorgan coined the term, or even that the cartoonist had heard it.)
During the 1910s, when Dorgan's cartoon was at its most popular, there was an ongoing debate over the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law in U.S. history to bar entry to the country on the basis of ethnicity or national origin. Chinese immigrants who had entered prior to its 1882 passage remained, however, and were often hired as "coolies", doing menial labor for low pay. "The idea was to express a cheap home run as Chinese then represented what was cheap, such as their labor", lexicographer David Shulman told Dickson. This was in keeping with a bevy of other contemporary such usages, such as calling a Ford automobile a "Chinese Rolls-Royce". Sheehan also wrote that it carried the additional "connotation of a homer of little account." He did not think that Dorgan, known for the gentleness of his satire, had meant it to be insulting, especially since he had two adopted sons from China.
In 1958, when the Giants moved to San Francisco and left the Polo Grounds, J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of The Sporting News, made another attempt to find the source of the term. He agreed with Sheehan that it had originated with Dorgan and the association of Chinese immigrants with cheap labor. However, his article was reprinted in the Los Angeles Times, and readers there wrote in with alternative suggestions.
One was from Travis McGregor, a retired San Francisco sportswriter. In his recollection, the term had been in use on the West Coast in the years just before World War I. He attributed it to a joke derived from an aspiring Chinese-American sportswriter covering minor league games in the Pacific Coast League, whom the typists at newspapers simply credited as "Mike Murphy" since they couldn't properly transcribe his name. "He had a keen sense of humor, a degree from Stanford and a great yen to be a newspaperman", McGregor wrote in his own letter to The Sporting News. As a result of his education, he spoke with no accent, but still used affected syntax. "He was a one-man show at baseball games ... for two or three seasons, an Oriental Fred Allen", according to McGregor. Once, he recalled, Murphy described one batter as "wave at ball like Mandarin with fan".
This phrase stuck in the minds of the other sportswriters in attendance and, McGregor suggested, it spread among all the league's writers, becoming a catch phrase. "The old Oakland park's short fence caught the most of it from Mike, and his 'Mandarin fan' waving balls out of the park were knocked back to 'Chinese homers'", said McGregor. A number of Murphy's comments were adapted into cartoons by Dorgan, a native of San Francisco, and from there the term migrated into print. McGregor believed that either Ed Hughes or Harry Smith of the San Francisco Chronicle were the first to do so, and better-known writers like Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon may have picked it up from them and popularized it nationwide.
Sportswriters extended the idea. Shulman wrote in 1930 of hearing them talk about short pop flies as "Chinese line drives". Texas Leaguers, or high bloop singles that fell between the infielders and outfielders, were likewise called "Japanese line drives" when hit in Pacific Coast League games.Dickson, 466.
There have been other theories to explain how home runs that barely cleared the fence came to be called "Chinese". Dan Schlossberg, a veteran Associated Press baseball writer, accepts the Dorgan story but also reports that Bill McGeehan, then sports editor of the New York Tribune, had in 1920 likened the right field fence at the Polo Grounds to the Great Wall of China: "thick, low, and not very formidable", suggesting that that may also have had something to do with the term's coinage. Russ Hodges, who called Giants games on the radio in both New York and San Francisco, told the latter city's Call-Bulletin in 1958 that the term came into use from the supposed tendency of Chinese gamblers watching games at the Polo Grounds in the early 20th century to cluster in seats next to the left field foul pole. "Any hit that went out at that point", he explained, "was followed by cries of 'There goes one for the Chinese'".
Another Sporting News columnist, Joe Falls, devoted a column to the term and solicited theories of its origin from readers. Some suggested that it had something to do with the "short jump" in Chinese checkers, or that since Chinese people were generally short, that short home runs would be named after them. Another reader claimed that the term arose because the outfield seats in the Polo Grounds supposedly stuck out in ways that suggested a pagoda.
History The term appears to have caught on quickly in baseball throughout the 1920s. By the 1950s, it was still in use but its connotations were no longer clear, and its use after one notoriously short home run that won a World Series game sparked a protest. After the 1964 demolition of the Polo Grounds, with its notoriously short right field fence, the term largely fell from use.
1920s–1954: Mel Ott
After establishing itself in baseball's argot, "Chinese home run" continued to be used, even while most of the other derogatory terms related to the Chinese fell from use; the American public opinion began to see the Chinese people in a more sympathetic light due to China's struggles against Japanese domination during the 1930s, struggles that led to the U.S. and China becoming allies during World War II. Within baseball it was frequently associated with the Giants and the Polo Grounds, with its short right-field fence. One Giant in particular, outfielder Mel Ott, was sometimes described as the master of the Chinese home run, since he hit many of his 511 career home runs (a National League record at the time of his retirement) to right field in the team's home stadium (although often to the upper deck) during his 1926–45 playing career.