English language idioms derived from baseball

American English has been enriched by expressions derived from the game of baseball. Sometimes referred to as "America's pastime," baseball has especially affected the language of other competitive activities such as politics and business.

This is an alphabetical list of common English-language idioms based on baseball, excluding the extended metaphor referring to sex, and including illustrative examples for each entry.

See also the Glossary of baseball for the jargon of the game itself, as used by participants, fans, reporters, announcers, and analysts of the game.

"'They said Itanium would never be their fastest 32-bit processor, but it would be in the ballpark. The original x86 hardware execution mechanism was not in the ballpark. It was barely in the parking lot around the ballpark,' Brookwood said.' – Stephen Shankland The New York Times, 23 April 2003.

"Patrick Wiles, a vice president of First Pioneer Farm Credit in Riverhead, said the 'ballpark figure' for prime vineyard land on the North Fork is $50,000 to $60,000 an acre, 'assuming the development rights have been sold.'" – Howard G. Goldberg, The New York Times, 18 July 2004.

MSNBC said Hillary knocked it “out of the park”. –New American Media, 27 August 2008.

"'But Boston Scientific also needs to hope that a rare event does not become magnified,' he said. 'It has to be pretty much batting a thousand for a time,' he said". — Reed Abelson, The New York Times, 27 July 2004.

headline: "Senator Jim Bunning Throws Beanball at America’s Unemployed" – Mason Lerner, The Faster Times, 26 February 2010.

"But Brown and Whitman didn’t swing at the questions, instead choosing to stick to a game of political beanball — trading jabs on Whitman’s housekeeper, a Brown aide’s “whore” remark and even verbal miscues. – Steven Luo, California Beat, 13 October 2010.

"For a listener who last heard the New Haven Symphony in the mid-60's, in a game but scrappy performance of Britten's War Requiem, its concert on Friday evening was a happy surprise. Under its music director, Michael Palmer, it sounded for the most part like a big-league band, at home in a big-league setting". — James Oestreich, The New York Times, 25 January 1994.

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