Some clichés are unique to the hometown announcing team — The White Sox’s TV voice, Hawk Harrelson, has one for every possible occasion, though some announcing teams are a little more judicious with their use — but there are also truisms that are far more widely used throughout the game. Some have been around so long, they don’t even seem like clichés anymore, they’re just part of the vocabulary of baseball.

By and large, as long as the repetition doesn’t bother viewers too much, these common turns of phrase are relatively harmless, though many of them assert truths that may not be quite right. Routine groundballs are seldom exactly that and may give viewers an unkind view of fielders who have trouble corralling them even if the particular grounder in question was anything but routine, for example. That particular turn of phrase is virtually impossible to test on any sort of larger scale.

One phrase that a number of broadcast teams have used – likely all of them, though I cannot assert that with certainty – occurs when one of the team’s faster runners reaches on an error by one of the opposing infielders. “They know he’s so quick coming out of that box” the color man might quip. “His speed forced the defense into that error!”

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