While we’re dragging managers out of retirement, melting bridges, and in general lighting everything on fire, I might as well throw in suggestions for an industry-wide deletion of baseball terms that tend to drag us down as a species.
These include but are not limited to:
-“Ribbie“: It’s an RBI, it’s always been an RBI, and this is not an acronym you can just pronounce willy-nilly. There’s NASA and then there’s RBI and only one of those needs its letters all phonetically mashed together.
–Goose egg: It’s bad enough to have a 0 in something without bringing geese into it. It is inelegant. It must die.
–Dinger: I shouldn’t have to explain why this is a problem.
–“Not the result we were hoping for”: When I first heard this in relation to a sports score, I was impressed. It acknowledged the defeat without sounding defeatist.
That was five years ago. Now people are using it for everything from the homecoming game to nuclear accidents. It’s done. We’re done with it. If you want a different result, stop sucking.
-Oppo Taco: This doesn’t even make any sense. You can’t just cram a baseball-adjunct word onto another word that rhymes and make it a functional phrase of the game. There is zero daylight between “Oppo Taco” and “Baseline Canine.”
Lose it.
–Can of corn: I had to look up where this stupid expression for a pop fly originated and the leading theory is that it came from grocery store clerks using sticks to push items on a high shelf to drop towards a waiting customer.
First of all, as a 21st-century petite lady, I demand to be seen. I have lost count of the number of shelves I’ve had to scale to grab the macaroni from the top of the freezer. Where did the guy with the stick go? Was it OSHA? I bet it was OSHA.
And secondly, corn from a can is disgusting and I don’t want lowdown words like that mixing with the likes of “bullpen,” “grand slam,” and “flutterball.”
Touch ’em all: See dinger
–“_____ is electric”: Elly is electric. Stop stealing Elly’s adjective. We don’t have a league full of Ellys; there’s only one Elly and you are just going to have to find your own descriptors for everybody else.
Do the work.
Bump: It’s a mound, not a case of cystic acne or a speed hump. Respect the center of the action.
No-No: You’re only saving one syllable by using this instead of “no hitter” and you’re turning yourself into a babbling toddler in the meantime. Elevate, gentlemen.
Grand Salami: A wicked and smelly perversion of one of baseball’s most exciting achievements. This treads upon the dignity of trolling the haters for the slammers and augmenting the furor and citywide embarrassment for the slam-ees. Such a feat deserves a far higher grade of lunch meat.
Throw Junk: It’s a depressing phrase for a depressing pitch.
And While I’m at It:
– Referring to one’s husband as “the hubs”
-Saying to any person in any way for any reason “You got this.”
You Can Stay:
-Bang-bang double play
-Ducks on the pond
-Slam range, which sounds like a complicated statistical measurement but is really a way of life in Cincinnati: “At least we kept them out of slam range this inning.”
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