How about a little chin music for Christmas?

In 1960, while I was dancing in the streets in Downtown Pittsburgh with hundreds of thousands of Pirate fans, my future wife Anita was barely aware that the Pirates had just won one of the most dramatic World Series in baseball history on a Bill Mazeroski walk-off home run. A senior at Coraopolis High School, she had little room for baseball in a world filled with sock hops, skate parties and thoughts about going to college.

All that began to change when Anita and I met at Edinboro State College and started getting serious about each other. Since then, she’s gone from sharing her husband’s love of the game to becoming a baseball fan in her own right. She used to read a book while I had a baseball game on television, but now she watches the game intently, has her favorite players and asks endless questions about our national pastime, including why it’s our national pastime.

She’ll ask questions about players with full beards and flowing locks ( “isn’t all that hair uncomfortable?”) or about the way players wear their uniforms ( “Isn’t he going to trip with his pants legs down around his ankles?”), questions that I can easily duck by telling her I had a crew-cut when I played ball on Pittsburgh sandlots and wore my pants legs knickers-style, just below the knees.

She’s critical of weak-hitting batters who strike out trying to hit home runs and out-of-shape pitchers who look like they’ve had one too many pizzas. She’s also fascinated by the language of baseball and wants to know, for example, why a broadcaster recently said that a batter missed a pitch because he stepped into the bucket when clearly there is no bucket in the batter’s box.

Most of the time I can answer Anita’s questions or at least pretend to know the answers, but, there’s also a handy reference book that’s often bailed me out, especially when it comes to the language of baseball. Paul Dickson’s “The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary,” first published in 1989 and expanded in a later edition, is a wonderland of information for baseball fans. More than a dictionary, it’s an encyclopedia filled with more than 7,000 baseball names, terms, and slang.

I can tell Anita, from my own experience, that when someone says that a batter steps into the bucket, it means that, instead of striding toward the pitcher with his front foot as he swings the bat, he strides away from the pitcher. It’s an awkward swing that suggests that either the batter is fooled by the pitch or afraid of getting hit by the ball. But that, of course, doesn’t explain that imaginary bucket.

With a little help from Paul Dickson, I was able to tell Anita that back in the early days of baseball, players sat on benches rather than in dugouts and drank out of a water bucket rather than from a bottle of Gatorade. So when an old-time batter appeared to step toward the bench with his front foot rather than toward the pitcher, he was mockingly accused of stepping into the bucket.

There are a number of new baseball books out this year, including one by a father and son team with local connections, but, if you want to give the fan in your life a baseball book for Christmas, you can’t go wrong with the latest edition of “The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary,” a delightfully entertaining compendium of the rich history and culture of our national game.

After listening to baseball commentators during the World Series use mind-numbing computer data to explain a batter’s “launch angle” or a pitcher’s “spin velocity,” what a relief to look back at a time when the language of baseball was fun, when a high fly ball was called “a can of corn,” a pop fly “a home run in an elevator shaft,” and, thanks to Hall of Fame Pirates broadcaster Bob Prince, an extra base hit on artificial turf “a bug on the rug.”

Of course, you may also want to give yourself the Dickson dictionary for Christmas, so that, next season, when that baseball fan in your life tells you that a batter just hit “a Baltimore chop” or “a dying quail” or a pitcher just threw some “chin music,” or “a radio ball” you’ll be able to translate the baseball slang and have some fun in the bargain.