 he
National Pastime has enriched the English Language. Just consider
the new meanings given to old words...
diamond and mound, ball and strike, count and error, out and safe, balk and slide, curve and hit, bat and field, run and walk, dugout and bullpen. grounder, knuckler, pitcher, slider, spitter run-down and squeeze-play, flyball and foulball, fastball and change-up.
An open-ended enterprise unhurried by clocks, baseball fosters a contemplative state of mind (see intellectual). Am I alone in the disappointment that all the game's gifted speakers and writers, which include... ...have yet to come up with a replacement for runs batted in (see iotacism)? The B in RBI (pronounced arby-aye) stands for batted. It is not necessary to have scored a hit. Your team can score a run (the R in RBI) on a sacrifice fly, for example. In the past tense, naturally, it's sacrifice flied. Otherwise you just flied out with a man left on (never mind the gender specificity) or with the bases loaded.
You describe a disadvantage as coming to bat with two strikes against you, a risky venture as swinging for the fences, and a timid policy as bunting down the line. Low quality is bush-league, and a dishonest person is a foul ball. Sometimes you can tell a good idea right off the bat, and you go to bat for a person you support even if he has screwball ideas. To confirm an appontment, you will touch base. You accept an approximation if it's in the ballpark and reject a proposal if it's out in left field.Ballparks are not all built exactly the same. A ground rule may be necessary to accommodate the peculiarities of a particular playing field. That was its original meaning. A ground rule double, for example, mandates a two bagger as the limit for a runner's progress when he hits a line drive or a grounder that gets lost in the ivy climbing on the right-field fence. Not surprising, the expression ground rule was picked up for use outside baseball. Thus, prior to starting a business meeting, one might establish ground rules for that session. Gradually ground rules would be adopted for departments and even whole companies -- sort of a nickname for "policies." An entire industry might even be said to operate under a set of ground rules. Same with a profession or a trade, for that matter. Eventually nations -- and the world. Now, in my book, that's going too far. Why not appropriate league rules and game rules? |
The
game is nothing without its superstitions (like never speaking of a no-hitter
while it's in progress) and its numbers: you have your averages
(earned-run and batting); you have your streaks and
slumps
(consecutive innings, games, hits). I have no
doubt that there's a computation of the number of flies caught in
left
field which were hit in even-numbered innings during
odd-numbered years by righthanded batters off lefthanded pitchers.
Lefthanders, by the way, are called southpaws because home plate
lies to the west in the typical ballpark -- park not stadium (baseball
may be the only professional sport played in a park).
aseball's
contributions to verbal conciseness are many.