Ballpark Estimate or Figure

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Gail.

Hey, Gail, where are you calling from?

Corning, New York. Upstate New York.

A ballpark estimate.

Ballpark estimate. What brought that to mind?

Contractors.

-oh.

And I thought, well, that’s just a way for them to fudge their add-ons, you know, and bills.

It’s just a saying that they throw around sometimes.

So you get a contractor out to do some work.

They give you a ballpark estimate, and it could be low, it could be high.

But for some reason the contractors always go high, don’t they?

Yeah.

There’s always something extra.

And so you were thinking, why do we call this a ballpark estimate?

My second thought was it had something to do with baseball.

And I thought maybe it was before official measurements or something on a field.

But I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the ball. I don’t know. I have no idea.

Baseball is definitely in there. Some reference books incorrectly say that the origins from estimating how many attendees are in the stands at a baseball game, but that is not the origin.

Instead, it’s from the Air Force.

No.

And it still has to do with baseball.

It comes from the 1940s when the Air Force started using ballpark to refer to the area of engagement for its fighters.

That is, where its aircraft would be involved with the enemy or for its maneuvers, whether they were engaging the enemy or they were just, you know, just flying their aircraft.

Whether it was in the air or they were dropping bombs or practice runs, that sort of stuff.

So wherever they happened to be working, whatever this large area was, whether it was 100 miles or one mile, that was their ballpark.

And so by the time the satellite era came around, it started being used as the place where satellites or rocket boosters would be dropped in the ocean.

So that would be the ballpark area where they would fall.

And so it left the Air Force and it left NASA and entered mainstream English through politics, actually, and started showing up in government news stories where government officials say, well, our ballpark estimate for this figure is 200 million.

Because the government officials would work with the military all the time and picked up the term from the military.

And then before you know it, it shows up in everyday language, just talking about general area, you know, something that’s not easily demarcated.

Yeah. Isn’t it interesting?

That is interesting that it started with the Air Force.

But where does the baseball come up there in the plains?

Because Americans love baseball.

Just think about it as their playing area.

If you’re in aircraft, it’s kind of like they’re told by their commanders, you can’t go beyond this area and this area.

This is your stadium, basically.

These are the boundaries that you have to stay within in order to keep this.

This is your playing field.

Baseball has loaned so many words to everyday language.

So I’m not surprised that all this term was borrowed by the Air Force from baseball, particularly because the young men who serve in the military probably also played baseball in their spare time.

I would like to look up more baseball sayings than you said.

Yeah, well, we always recommend Paul Dixon’s D-I-C-K-S-O-N Baseball Dictionary.

It’s up to the third edition now.

It is a fantastic book, and it’s highly recommended.

Your library may even have a copy of it.

Yeah, Gail, thanks so much for calling.

Thank you so much.

That’s very interesting.

I love your show.

All right, take care of yourself.

Thanks, Gail.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

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