I'll take 'Confidence' for $200, Chuck.

A particularly gritty one is "Grit".

Or "heart".

My ears are burning. Sure, I'll sell my confidence for two C-notes. I can make up for its absence with my professionalism and tools.

I was thinking about words like "crafty," "fireballing/flamethrowing," and "slick/surehanded," but in fairness to those words, they do at least have a tiny modicum of descriptive meaning. I think the winner of the Overused Word Award has to be something completely devoid of insight.

So here's my top 10:

10. "unorthodox"
9. "dominant"
8. "classy"
7. "percentages"
6. "routine"
5. "untracked"
4. "key"
3. "versatile"
2. "stuff"
1. "promising"

I suppose "clutch" should be there somewhere.

youneverknow

experienced
well-travelled
journeyman

they are all similar, but they are so overused...

"Character", when referring to a concept, not a person. (I like characters, and wish there were more of them in the game. I miss George Bell.)

I'd also like to toss in a vote for "disciplined", which allows me to segue into an aside: I am becoming annoyed with the term "plate discipline". It implies that drawing walks is morally superior to going up there and hacking away at pitches. It also implies that any major league hitter can learn to draw walks, provided he's "unselfish" enough (there's another word for your list).

I've noticed that none of the new sabermetricians seem to mention that the ability to figure out whether a 90 mph pitch is coming in just above the knees or just below them is, to a certain extent, an innate ability.

I thought about this when I watched Homer Bush hit. Homer wasn't capable of drawing walks - if he waited to see whether the pitch was a strike, he screwed up his timing. The only way he could be successful at all was to take a "see ball, hit ball" approach.

[end of thread hijack]

I forgot to add: instead of calling it "plate discipline", they should call it "pitch recognition". Not only does this remove the moral component - it's also a more accurate description of the skill. A good hitter doesn't just recognize, and lay off, bad pitches - he recognizes hittable pitches and whacks them.

"Stuff" is a good one... Here is all the evidence I need - Baseball Prospectus (and you thought they were above this kind of thing) mis-uses it as a name for a pitching metric which has a lot more to do with "dominance" than "stuff" as far as I'm concerned.

And "metric" makes the list of words overused in sabermetrics. Come to think of it, how long until sabermetrics / sabermetrician / sabermetrically makes the list?

This is intense. I'm struggling.

Machine is getting way overused in my mind.

As in 'On Base Machine' and 'Developmental Machine'.

Dave T: I am becoming annoyed with the term "plate discipline". It implies that drawing walks is morally superior to going up there and hacking away at pitches. It also implies that any major league hitter can learn to draw walks, provided he's "unselfish" enough (there's another word for your list).

Maybe you can't learn pitch recognition, but you can still be selfish/smart or unselfish/dumb. Remember Chuckie Carr's famous last words before being released into oblivion shortly after ignoring the take sign on a 2-0 pitch: "That's not Chuckie's game. 2 and 0, Chuckie's hacking."

Every-day. Wheels. Smoke. Heat. Cheese. Gas.

Shouldn't there be a rule in baseball that if you're going to talk about yourself in the third person you should at least be good. Rickey Henderson at least has a claim to that, Chuckie does not.

Third person self-referencing - it's been around for a long time, and was annoying from the start.

Slightly off-center, but a common sports talking-head misspeak is the mis-use of "clinch".

Specifically, when team A wins a best of seven series in game five, and some idiot reporter tells us team A "clinched" the series - that makes me crazy. You can't clinch a series - you can clinch a spot in the post season - but not a series. Am I crazy? Or does clinch directly imply "guaranteed a win/berth in playoffs with games yet to play".

And "stat-head" is over-used empty blather now too.

So we're listing the mundane and banal. How about the uniquely descriptive words? You know, where just one word says a lot about a particular player or play?

That's right, friends. It's time for the 10 most UNDERUSED words in baseball!

10. "Garces-sized"
9. "Chaw-slobbering"
8. "Barry-armoured"
7. "Moyerish"
6. "Jeremyesque" for insipid running; "Jeromyesque" for insipid hitting
5. "Torii-worthy"
4. "Coors-inflated"
3. "Vlad-tastic"
2. "Otis-gauntly"
1. "Brewerian"

I am becoming annoyed with the term "plate discipline". It implies that drawing walks is morally superior to going up there and away at pitches. It also implies that any major league hitter can learn to draw walks, provided he's "unselfish" enough...

Great points, Dave! I've been thinking the same thing over the last couple of days regarding Vernon Wells' seeming inability to "learn" to draw a walk, to the point where I was almost ready to call for Mike Barnett's head and have Rettenmund inserted as the hitting coach (after all, wasn't Barny brought along by Buck initially?!) I don't think that plate disciple/pitch recognition is innate at all, but there must be a "critical period" (definitely not at the major league level) at which a hitter can learn the skill.

"pitchability" (see Arnold, Jason)

http://economics.about.com
How about "clubhouse cancer".

Why all the cancer references? I mean, there are other diseases too you know. I would *love* to hear someone called "clubhouse syphilis" or "clubhouse gonorrhea". That would make my day.

Mike

As a guesstimate, I'd say that the walk rates of 70% of major leaguers (assuming they survive for more than a few seasons) increase as they age. I'm not worried about Vernon.

I also think that young players sometimes find it hard to draw walks because pitchers are still challenging them with their best stuff. Even the most patient hitters can't draw walks unless the pitcher pitches four times out of the strike zone.

Mike D: the most underused words in baseball are "Blue Jays World Series victory." :-)

mindset
frame of mind
attitude
junkballer
slop
offspeed
raw
untested
fresh-faced

and I ca't believe we left off what is unquestionably the MOST oversued, and meaningless, word of all...


VETERAN


Oh, yeah.