Broom - Other Uses For Brooms

Other Uses For Brooms

• In baseball, when the home team is close to accomplishing a sweep (having won the first two games of a three-game series or first three games of a four-game series), some fans will bring brooms to the ballpark and brandish them as a way of taunting the visiting team. (Examples: Arkansas vs LSU- 2011; Red Sox v. Yankees—May 13–15, 2011 and June 7–9, 2011)

• During World War II, American submarine crews would hoist a broom onto their boat's fore-truck when returning to port to indicate that they had "swept" the seas clean of enemy shipping. The tradition has been devalued in recent years by submarine crews who fly a broom simply when returning from their boat's shake-down cruise. This tradition no doubt stems from the action of the Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp who tied a broom to his main mast after defeating the British admiral Robert Blake at the Battle of Dungeness in 1652. This has often been interpreted as a message that he would sweep the British from the seas. This story remains unsubstantiated, but may have its origin in the tradition of hoisting a broom as a sign that a ship was for sale, which seems more likely as Tromp had captured two of Blake's ships in the battle. It is also sometimes said that the story of Tromp hoisting a broom was an embellishment on an earlier English joke that Tromp displayed a broom because his ships were useless against the English and he wished to be rid of them. If true, this could be taken as confirmation of the tradition.