Be Your Own Editor

If you hate sports and never write about sports and have no intention of ever writing anything remotely to do with sports, you can probably skip this post. But I advise you to bookmark it, because you might find yourself writing a romance novel one day in which the hero is a former slugger for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Okay, maybe not the Devil Rays…

I recently edited a few books about football for different publishers, and it raised some interesting questions about the proper usage of team names. I’ll note this up front: I’m a sports fan. (Yankees suck! Guess which team’s my favorite.) Also being a writer and editor, over the years I’ve encountered such questions as “How the heck do I express the singular of ‘Red Sox?’ Would it be ‘David Ortiz is a Red Sock’ or ‘David Ortiz is a Red Sox?’” Bad sportswriters avoid this particular issue by using a silly-sounding made-up construction such as “Red Soxer David Ortiz.”

But the Red (and White) Sox are uniquely problematic. I’m going to address more common team names that are plural forms of nouns, e.g., the Steelers, the Knicks, the Yankees. Being a Sox fan, I’ve both written and read the word “Yankees” in many sentences and have too often seen that final “s” dropped off when it shouldn’t be.

Will you find this in The Chicago Manual of Style? No. But if you’re writing a book that has to do with sports, it’ll come up. So I’m bestowing upon you my own finely honed set of rules for sports team name usage. Questions of when to use the letter “s” and when to add apostrophes boil down to whether you’re using the team’s name as an adjective or as a noun.

Example: “Derek Jeter is a Yankee.” Perfectly fine to use the singular; it’s a noun. But it’s become habit, even among sports broadcasters and sportswriters, to say things such as “the Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter” or “Yankee fans love Derek Jeter.” In these cases, the team’s name is an adjective describing Jeter or the fans. I’m not going to say the sports pages are amateurish for not using the more correct “Yankees fans.” But book writing should be a little more formal and grammatically precise than writing on ESPN.com, or everyday speech. (By the way, Yankees fans suck no matter what you call them.)

The other issue that comes up is apostrophe usage. This one gets more complicated. Just to mix things up, I’ll switch sports.

The Patriots offense scored 20 points.
The Patriots’ offense scored 20 points.

Which is correct? Trick question: both! In the first sentence, “Patriots” can be seen as an adjective modifying “offense.” (What kind of offense? The Patriots offense!) These adjective constructions are the ones where you’ll be tempted to write “the Patriot offense.” Don’t. The team’s name is the Patriots. In the second sentence, “Patriots’” is a possessive noun (”the offense of the Patriots”).

So which should you use? Look carefully at the context of the sentence. Sometimes it simply looks awkward to use an apostrophe, or vice versa. And if you leave out “the” before the team’s name, it’s no longer a noun, so it no longer can become a possessive. So none of this:

Mets’ pitcher Pedro Martinez has a great fastball.

See, you could write “New York’s pitcher,” because “New York” is a complete proper name. But the proper name of the team isn’t “Mets,” it’s “the Mets.” So one should write either “the Mets’ pitcher Pedro Martinez” or “Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez.” And don’t get carried away and start writing “Mets’s”—”Mets” is already plural.

Got it? I’m sure I’ve missed some nuances of this important subject (I write that without sarcasm). Feel free to ask questions or point those nuances out. And yes, I wrote this post because the Red Sox were rained out tonight.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.