Jay Hanna Dean. better remembered as Dizzy Dean, grew up to enjoy a brief but spectacular baseball career with the St. Louis Cardinals. Together with his brother Paul (nicknamed Daffy), Dizzy Dean pitched his team to success in the 1934 World Series.

After Dizzy was conked on the head by a thrown ball during that Series, the pitcher attempted to reassure his fans and teammates with the news that "The doctors x-rayed my head and found nothing." A few years later, after Dizzy left the pitching mound in favor of the announcer's booth, such dizzy-sounding Deanisms, as they were known, became as regular a part of baseball as the cries of hot dog vendors. In the game according to Dizzy, a play remarkable for real courage was praised as an act of testicle fortitude. The way Dizzy reported things, players returned to their respectable bases, and runners slud into third.

In baseball, such colorful expressions are known as Deanisms. But just to keep the linguistic record straight, off the baseball diamond, slud is not usually considered an acceptable past tense inflection for the verb slide. Slid is preferred, slod is the usual dialectal form, and slided is considered archaic.