A WHORFIAN COMES TO BASEBALL. I have posted a number of times about Whorfianism and posted here on my own Whorfian tendencies, so I was pleased to see Ken Arneson begin his article on pitch sequences with what he calls the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: “The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a/k/a the Linguistic relativity principle holds that the language that a person speaks influences the way a person conceptualizes their world. The obvious example of this is that people have trouble distinguishing between colors if their language does not have a word for that color.”
Arneson, who is fluent in both Swedish and English, gives the example that Swedish makes “clear distinctions” between belief in an opinion and belief in a fact (tycka and tro) and English does not.
Arneson gives a Whorfian explanation for why journalists and fans ignore pitch sequences. They ignore them because there is no data and no language for discussing pitch sequences.