FAUX NEWS NETWORK

Slightly Off Base

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.