by Derek Munson on August 22, 2009
There are a zillion baseball analogies out there. There’s “hitting it out of the park,” and “striking out.” There are people who “play hardball” and there are people “way out there in left field”… But I haven’t heard any new ones in a loooong time. Maybe all that’s left are the more obscure elements of baseball. But I guess you could also reuse some of those common elements. Anyone have any new ideas? Here are a couple, just to get the ball rolling. (Hey is that a bowling metaphor?)
A person whose overconfidence costs them in the end was “picked off at third base.”
If you are a bold person willing to take risks, you are “someone who isn’t afraid to bunt with 2 strikes”
I know- these are pretty lame. And I’ll probably look back on this tomorrow and think “why the hay did I publish that?” But then I’ll remember that I needed to get a new entry up here and I’ll feel a little bit better for a while.
And in conclusion, I could be clever and end with a final baseball metaphor, but that might be too cheap and corny and embarassing, and would definitely put me over the top as far as deciding to delete this post. So instead I’ll just finish it up with a final request for new metaphors and call it good.
Tagged as:
baseball analogies,
baseball analogy,
baseball cliches,
baseball metaphors
by Derek Munson on August 11, 2009
I never thought about this until just this second, but the first book I ever tried to write was about colonizing the moon. And the second book I ever tried to write was about baseball. Outer space and baseball were on my mind all along. Kinda crazy, since it took me another 10 years or so before I figured that out.
Anyway, neither of those were ever published. They both pretty much sucked. The moon story rambled on without any plot in sight, and the baseball book read like an instruction manual. But the concept in the baseball book was interesting enough. It just wasn’t worthy of hundreds of pages of contemplation.
The idea was that the flow of time in baseball is different from every other sport. There are sports with clocks running down (like soccer and basketball and football), where the scoring and the clock are separate things. And there are sports where the scoring is the clock itself. These ones are like races. For example, running and golf are sports where the players are trying to cross the finish line in as few ticks of the clock or strokes of the club as possible. And tennis and volleyball are races to win 3 sets.
But baseball is different. At the fundamental heart of baseball you have strikes and balls. If a pitcher throws only strikes*, then strikes lead to outs and outs lead to innings and innings lead to games. And if a pitcher throws only balls, then balls lead to walks and walks lead to runs and runs lead to victory. One determines your location in the game and season, and one determines your location in the score and standings. Interestingly, if one of these elements (the ball/baserunner or the strike/out) were missing, you’d never see the end of a game.
The end result is an epic battle between time and eternity. The defense is trying to move time along, pitch by pitch, out by out, game by game. The offense is trying to suspend the flow of time altogether. Ultimately it’s a quest for immortality over death, a mini version of life itself, played out on a baseball diamond.
Now I remember why I thought this was so cool.
* This example starts with a batter here who doesn’t swing the bat. I can get into the swings and all that later if anyone besides me thinks this is remotely interesting…
Tagged as:
artificial time,
eternity,
game of the day,
sports philosophy,
sports scoring,
time
