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| "Can you give us a ballpark figure?" |
Not long ago, I was watching a training video about business negotiations (riveting stuff!) when suddenly I heard one British businessman ask another for ‘a ballpark figure’.
a ballbark figure = an approximate offer or bid that is within the scope
of a negotiation and thus can serve as the starting point for counter-offers by
the other party.
Now, I know that
the pin-striped gentleman in question knew what he was talking about, but I
couldn’t help wondering if he knew what exactly a ‘ballpark’ is and why a ‘figure’
should be so denominated. Could it be a park in which some kind of balls are
played with? No doubt, but what does this have to do with figures or
negotiating? Sounds like a terribly serious kind of park!
Of course, any
American would know that a ‘ballpark’ is a place where baseball is played, whether this is Yankee Stadium or one’s local
Little League field. And the nec plus
ultra of baseball playing, the moment of sublime euphoria (for your team at
least) is when a batter of yours hits the ball ‘out of the park’; that is to
say, out of the stadium itself and into the stands (or in the case of the local
playing field, into a public thoroughfare and through someone’s car window!).
The important thing is that the ball cannot then be returned to the ‘diamond’
and so the triumphant batter jogs casually around all three bases for a ‘home
run’, while the team in the field stands around cursing helplessly and spitting
into the grass.
Likewise, if an
offer or demand in a negotiation is so astronomically unreasonable that no
negotiation is possible, we might as well all go home and forget it. And so we
ask for a ‘ballpark figure’ – a rough estimate, but still inside the ‘park’ and
‘playable’ (i.e. negotiable).
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| Coors Field, Denver, Colorado |
Baseball, like poker, boxing and horse racing, is an enormous source of idiomatic language in the US and, if that video is any indication, it looks like this is spreading to the UK as well. A ‘ballpark figure’ does sound sexier than a ‘cricket pitch figure’!
Well, here are a
few more baseball idioms:
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| "Hello, Pete? Yeah, Dave here. Just wanted to touch bases with you on that Halliburton deal." |
You might hear
someone say, especially on the telephone, that they want ‘to touch base(s)’ with someone else.
to touch bases with someone = to exchange information with someone about a particular project or situation and update each other on the latest events.
This one may sound
universal for its associations with the latinate ‘base/basis/basically’, but of
course it comes from the requirement that a baseball player, having hit the
ball into the playing field, has then to physically touch each of the three
bases as he runs round the diamond to home plate. If a player on the other
team, while holding the ball, manages to touch the base the batter is running
toward before he gets there, or touch the runner with the ball, the runner is declared
‘out’ and has to leave the field. ‘Touching bases’, then, is an all-important
element in baseball, as is staying on top of things in the business world.
Similarly, ‘to cover all the bases’ is what the team in
the field has to do to keep the team batting from advancing around the bases;
namely, being in position and ready to
respond quickly as needed. As an idiom, it means to make sure that every
potentiality has been considered and prepared for. NASA, for example, are sure
to ‘cover all the bases’ when they launch one of their expensive rockets. No
matter what might go wrong, they’ve already thought of it and have some system
or other in place to solve the problem.
Meanwhile, ‘to be off base’
simply means that a player is not physically touching the base he is ‘on’. He is
then in danger of being ‘put out’ if the ball is suddenly thrown to the baseman
before he gets back to it, or if he himself is touched with the ball. In
everyday conversation, though, it refers to an inappropriate or unfair comment that
offends someone else: ‘I think you were way off base to criticise my mother’s
cooking. You should have kept your comments to yourself!’
The ball:
The ball and one’s
relationship to it is, of course, the key to success on the baseball field and,
generally speaking, a person who is ‘on
the ball’ is someone who is alert, capable and dependable. Someone who ‘drops the ball’, on the other hand, is
one who disappoints, especially by being lax in the execution of a duty, as in:
‘We lost the contract because that idiot in the legal department dropped the
ball’. (OK, that one might also have come from American football!)
Or you may hear that someone ‘plays hardball’, which means that they
are serious adversaries with no mercy for weaker opponents. This one is popular
in gangster movies: ‘Better pay ‘em what they want – those guys play hardball.’
However, the original expression doesn’t mean that a player plays hard. It
refers to regulation baseball, which is called ‘hardball’, as opposed to the
more amateur ‘softball’, which uses a bigger, softer and less dangerous ball (and
believe me, a standard baseball is hard – one broke my nose when I was
12 years old!).
 | ||
| These guys play hardball. |
The legendary ‘curveball’:
Jill: Hey, how was
your job interview?
Bill: Well,
everything was going fine until the interviewer threw me a curve by asking my opinion of the company’s new A-14
widgets. I hadn’t expected them to ask me technical questions about their
products. I don’t even know what a widget is!
to throw someone a curve = to do or say
something unexpected that someone else has difficulty reacting to correctly.
 | ||
| "That really threw me a curve." |
As you probably
know, the batter’s objective is to hit the ball, while the pitcher’s job is to
make doing that as difficult as possible. And those pitchers have a lot of
tricks up their sleeves! Some of them can throw what is known as a ‘curveball’,
where, by a skilful twist of the wrist, the ball is given a slight spin that
causes its trajectory to curve suddenly when the batter least expects it. A
pitcher who can master this, and other tricky pitches, is a
formidable one indeed!
Some people used to
believe that the curveball was an optical illusion, but scientists have proven
them wrong. It really does curve. You can’t argue with Wikipedia!
Another way to
refer to something unexpected is to say that it ‘came from out of left field’, which is also a baseball idiom. Left
field is the outer left extremity of the playing field, where relatively little
action occurs. This is because a right-handed batter rarely hits a ‘fly ball’
to that side. Hits to the left are usually along the ground or at player level,
which is why there is a player (the ‘shortstop’) stationed along the 2nd
to 3rd base path. However, a left-handed batter (or ‘southpaw’, as
they are called), may well hit a high fly to left field, and that’s when it’s
time for the leftfielder to… well… wake up.
And what about ‘stepping up to the plate’?
to step up to the plate = to assume a responsibility
This one seems to
be gaining in popularity lately. I heard an interview with a former NGO worker
(another Brit) who said that when he and his wife had their first child he had
given up his charity job for a higher-paying one in the profit sector: ‘I
thought it was time I stepped up to the plate and began providing for my family.’
In baseball, ‘home plate’ is where the batter stands while batting, as well as the
final destination for one’s mad dash around the three bases. Stepping up to the
plate is that nerve-wracking moment when it all depends on you!
Well, that’s it for
now. There are really so many baseball idioms that it’s a huge task to list
them all. I’ve taken a swing at a
few of them – I hope it’s been fun.
to take a swing at something = to try to do something
And speaking of heavy hitters...
heavy hitters = extremely capable
professionals that you call upon when the competition gets particularly fierce
...here’s a great
song about Jackie Robinson, the first black player to be accepted into the
major leagues.
Yes yes, Jackie hit that ball!
Magic Bob
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