… but you doesn’t have to call him Johnson Putz.

The New York Times, on baseball and Yiddish vulgarity:

The columnists Steve Kelley of The Seattle Times and Art Thiel of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer said they never heard Putz™s name used as an insult against him, either at the ball park or by letter writers and talk-radio callers in Seattle. Putz played for the Mariners from 2003 to 2008.

Putz said that he had rarely heard his name used derisively, even in high school in Michigan.

œDude, I was bigger than everybody in high school, he said.

But his last name may be no joking manner, particularly in New York. The 2000 United States Census reported that nearly two-thirds of the estimated 178,945 people in this country who speak Yiddish at home live in New York. New Jersey had the third-highest number of Yiddish speakers, after Florida.

The state of Washington had an estimated 423.

Oy vey!