Berkowitz: Baseball players talk in cliches; here are the ones they actually use
From Bonnie Berkowitz, Manas Sharma, and Leslie Shapiro at the Washington Post on August 29, 2018:
The cliche-spouting baseball player has become … well, a cliche.
“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 mashup 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.
Read the full article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/sports/baseball-cliches/
Originally published: August 29, 2018. Last Updated: August 29, 2018.