BONNIE BERKOWITZ, MANAS SHARMA AND LESLIE SHAPIRO ANALYTICS OF THE CLICHÉ
Baseball players are famous for those familiar phrases we hear all the time — here are the ones they actually use
The cliché-spouting baseball player has become ... well, a cliché.
“This is what you work your whole life for,” says Stereotypical Baseball Superstar. “Over the course of this season, we’ve gone through a lot of adversity, but we’ve got a special group of guys up and down the lineup. We are firing on all cylinders and looking forward to taking care of business. The goal is to win the game, but I’m going to try to stay focused and treat it like any other day.”
Do baseball folks really talk like that? Yes and no.
Nobody said that paragraph. It is a mash-up of phrases uttered multiple times in nearly 7,000 interviews of major league players and managers between 1997 and 2018. In transcripts of those interviews, we found roughly 20,000 phrases (and their variations) that occurred over and over (including “over and over,” which showed up 113 times). We eliminated normal baseball terminology, then took a look at what we had.
Here’s what came up big. (Also, “came up big ” came up 100 times).
One of the most common word combinations was some version of “that’s a good question” (522 times), which is often a verbal space filler that gives an interviewee time to think.
Baseball players may be asked questions almost daily over a 162game season, plus playoffs for the lucky few. It’s no wonder every answer is not “a breath of fresh air” (14) — or that 18 guys mentioned “sleeping in my own bed.”
A classic scene in the 1988 movie Bull Durham elevated the interview cliché to both a critical skill and an inside joke. After a veteran catcher schools a dopey-but-talented minor leaguer on the best boring phrases to use in media interviews, the protege gets to the big leagues and rattles them off like a seasoned pro.
The advice was obviously timeless. Variations of two of those clichés, “I’m just happy to be here” (125) and “we gotta play ’em one day at a time” (485), still routinely show up in the speech of real major leaguers.
We eliminated technical baseball language from our count — “down the left field line,” for instance, is a description rather than a cliché — but that still left some quirky phrases that are either widely used in sports or are specific to “the game of baseball” (329 times).
Players and managers stressed the need to “put the bat on the ball” (50) and “play your game” (185) and “find a way to get it done” (75). Pitchers “pound the strike zone” (and attack and command it, 87 times total). Twenty-seven noted that “good pitching beats good hitting.”
But many of the most common word combinations were not baseballisms but widely used phrases that come up in everyday English.
For example, the top phrase was some version of a “heck of a job,” “a tremendous job,” “an incredible job,” etc., which appeared in more than half the transcripts (3,583 times). Regular people also say that all the time. Perhaps the best known instance of “heck of a job” was uttered not by an athlete but by a U.S. president.
These phrases aren’t random. They are chosen to communicate ideas.
Players try to sound truthful — “to be honest with you” showed up 638 times — and magnanimous, as 301 wanted to “tip my hat” to someone else. And they’re a notoriously superstitious bunch; “knock on wood” appeared 59 times.
Reaching for the same words and phrases again and again doesn’t make a person inarticulate or lazy, language experts say — it just makes them human.
“When we put a sentence together, our brains are not just retrieving individual words from our memory. We are often retrieving larger chunks,” said Nathan Schneider, a computational linguist at Georgetown University. “It’s a good thing. It’s one of the things that helps you come up with a fluent sentence without having to be completely creative in every word you use when putting the sentence together.”
Many of the most common word combinations were not baseballisms but widely used phrases that come up in everyday English.
Many of the most common phrases were idioms — phrases that mean something different from the literal meaning of their words. “Grabbing the bull by the horns” (9), for instance, nearly always means confronting a problem rather than an actual bull.
Idioms are like code phrases that help us build rapport with other people by demonstrating that we are part of the group, Schneider said. If you’re not “on the same page” (161), they make no sense.
Idioms showed up hundreds of times, from “bringing something to the table” (125) and “putting the cart before the horse” (15) to keeping something “on the back burner” (13) and being “all in the same boat” (40).
“If you were to give a computer these texts and ask the system to figure out what baseball is about based on the words,” Schneider said, “it might get confused and think that baseball involves horses and boats and burners.”
Here are some of the most common and most interesting phrases from our data. “Please take a look” (101).
COMMON PHRASES
All the confidence in the world
■ Look forward to the challenge
■ Glad to be here
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Sleep in my own bed
■ No question in my mind
■ Off to a good start
■ It’s supposed to be fun
■ Been around a long time
■ Way to get it done
■ It’s an honour
■ Going about our business
■ It is what it is
■ Nothing we can do about it
■ See what happens tomorrow
■ Learned a long time ago
■ Done a heck of a job
■ Came up big
■ Took it for granted
■ Healthiest frame of mind
■ Ridiculous question
■ A firm believer
■ Stay focused
■ Stay in the moment
■ Quality group of guys
■ Little bit of everything
■ Go out there and do my thing
■ To be completely honest with ■ you
Can guarantee you ■
Take our chances ■
Law of averages
■ Have a lot of respect for ■
IDIOMS
Look at the big picture
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Pick your poison
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Keep your head up
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Nature of the beast
■
Double-edged sword
■
Roller coaster ride
■
I’ve got my hands full
■
The cream of the crop
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Rise to the occasion
■
Pick up the slack
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Nothing to lose
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Cart before the horse
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I’ve got my work cut out for me
■
Firing on all cylinders
■
Get our butt kicked
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In the driver’s seat
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Put your best foot forward
■
In the same boat
■
On the back burner
■
On the same page
■
Years down the road
■
No rhyme or reason
■
Bring something to the table
■
Breath of fresh air
■
Light at the end of the tunnel
■
Knock on wood
■ Trust your instinct
■ The bull by the horns
■ Taking care of business
■ Cross that bridge when we come
■ to it
Tip your hats
■ Fingers crossed
■
BASEBALL TALK
Best fans in baseball
■ Went through a lot of issues
■ One year at a time
■ Good pitching beats good hitting
■ Give ____ a shot
■ Knows how to win
■ Play as hard as you can
■ The best arms in baseball
■ A great baseball town
■ In front of the home crowd
■ Up and down the lineup
■ Pound the strike zone
■ In the game of baseball
■ A true competitor
■ He’s a baseball player
■ Our goal is to win
■ Set the table
■ In the heat of battle
■ Put us on the board
■ Once ever in the history of baseball
■ It’s all about winning today
■ This is what we play for
■ Put the bat on the ball
■ Over the course of the year
■ Play my game
■ Big win for us
■ Banged up a little
■ The way it’s supposed to be
■ Treat it like any other game
■ It comes down to honouring
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