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Baseball, a precision game, has a lot of imprecision in its
language. When a batter comes up and the
team is down by a run in the bottom of the ninth they say he’s “the tying
run.” No, he’s the “potential” tying
run. He has to get on base or hit such
that he scores. There are a number of
other rather silly baseball phrases and one of the most common is after 4.5
innings the announcer says we’re half way through. No you’re not half way through, because one
team has batted 5 times and the other team only 4. So you’re not half way
through. What you’ve done is play 4.5
innings. Another involves scoring and
the term “sacrifice” fly. That’s where a
person hits a fly ball deep enough so a runner from third can tag and
score. Sometimes a batter might be
deliberately doing that, sacrificing himself; other times if it’s a big
difference in score and he just happens to hit a fly ball where a runner
happens to be on third with less than two outs.
It’s a scoring aberration that has become a custom. But, for a number of years, believe it or
not, a fly ball which scored a runner from third was an RBI, but it counted
against your batting average, The idea
was that you were trying to get a hit, but failed. This rule actually existed in 1941 when Ted
Williams had 406 and he would have hit somewhere in the neighborhood of
415. Again, baseball, a precision game
in terms of stats and analysis has some remarkably imprecise language.
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