The term 'Dipsy doodle' did not originate in sports. It was, I believe, the name of a dance and/or the title of a popular song of the 1930's.

Welcome aBoard, willhoff. I'm wondering if it's possible the Great Anu made a mistake? Another member here posted in 'Miscellany' that it's a 1937 Tommy Dorsey tune.

W3 has the baseball sense as no. 3, but "origin unknown"

1. a bewildering plunge and lag by turns [in economics]
2. artfully deceptive or shady manipulation [in politics]
3. a very slow curve on a pitched ball in baseball

Dear willhoff: I owe you a humble apology for having made a post in Miscellany about your topic, having failed to check this location first. I have sent you a PM with more detail. Bill Hunt

And I too confess to and pray forgiveness of the same error.

The other thread, to which I have appended a link to this one, is
http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?
Cat=&Board=miscellany&Number=51312&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5
and is hereby incorporated by reference ("lawyerspeak").

The suggestion was made by Keiva in the Misc. thread that this sounds like a Dizzy Dean expression. I can also easily imagine it coming from Satchel Paige. He also opines that the expression could have gone either way, from the song/dance to sports or vice versa. Since the possibilities are so close chronologically further research is needed to pin it down one way or the other. I respectfully submit that hearsay evidence is unreliable, even if from people alive at the time. Someone may have noticed it first in a secondary context and have assumed it to be the primary source.

> I respectfully submit that hearsay evidence is unreliable...

as another example, I would have bet dollars to doits that hat trick originated in ice hockey, from the tradition of spectators throwing their headgear on the ice upon the incidence of a player scoring his third goal of a game. then there is the octopus trick used in Detroit...

tsuwm would have bet dollars to doits that hat trick originated in ice hockey

This is just a specific example of a general phenomenon. We go through our lives blithely not noticing something or other and then it springs up all around us. I don't think that I got everybody started driving red cars just because I started noticing all the red cars on the road after I got mine.

tsuwm has to be kidding. Ice hockey began comparatively recently.Cricket is so much older that its being the source of the phrase "hat trick" seems far more probable.

I looked it up in Quinion:

It comes from the English game of cricket and refers to a bowler who
takes three wickets with three successive balls. For those more familiar
with baseball, this is an impressive achievement, similar to a baseball
pitcher striking out three batters in a row, but much less common. It seems
to have been the custom in the nineteenth century for such a paragon of the
art to be awarded a new hat by his club as a mark of his success.
However, it is sometimes also said that the phrase alludes to a distinctly
more plebeian reward in which the bowler was permitted to take his hat
around the crowd for a collection (not necessarily a bowler hat, of course:
that was named after a couple of completely different chaps, Messrs
Thomas and William Bowler, hatmakers). Hat trick was first recorded in
print in the 1870s, but has since been widened to apply to any sport in
which the person competing carries off some feat three times in quick
succession, such as scoring three goals in one game of soccer.

my point, assuming that I had one atall, was that I was surprised to learn otherwise.
you may cease looking for further corroboration.

Ice hockey is "comparatively recent", dr. bill? (belM, where are you?) Surely it is old enough to have generalete word-coinages.

[to be editied upon checking some resources at home]

Dear Keiva: The shoe skates necessary to play professional hockey were not available when I was ten years old. How vividly I remember my first pair of shoe skates, and how glady I said goodby to the old clamp on ones.

Dear Keiva: I found a site indicating ice hockey is a hundred years older than I thought. But no reference to hat trick.

http://www.gameofhockey.com/hockey-evidence.html

The shoe skates necessary to play professional hockey were not available when I was ten years old.

The shoe skates necessary to play professional hockey with the intensity of today's game were not available when you were ten years old, Dr. Bill. The NHL dates back to 1917.

Not to mention that it is entirely possible that the expression could have been inherited from field hockey.

Note: I am NOT disputing the cricket origin of the term 'hat trick'. I am merely saying that there is no reason that the term could NOT have come from elsewhere.

Well, folks, I never heard of it as a Tommy Dorsey tune. I vaguely remember Bill Haley having recorded it, and I could probably dig out his cover if I could be bothered going downstairs and digging through the collection of moldy vinyl platters sandwiched between fading and disintegrating slices of cardboard that my record collection has become. I never knew it was a dance.

BUT, and this is a very small and totally insignificant "but", I had seen it used in economics. Once. Precisely.