"Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable--and on the face of it more bewildering--recent neologisms are to dial 8 for a home run and Linda Ronstadt for a good fastball. Dial 8 comes from the practice among hotels of requiring customers to dial 8 for a long-distance line. Linda Ronstadt, more complicatedly, is an allusion to her song "Blue Bayou," the significance of which becomes less puzzling when you reflect that a good fastball "blew by you." Baseball terms presumed to be new often are not."