Talking Baseball

The Interesting Grammar of MLB Graphics

*As always, when I am discussing language variation, I am not judging but describing. The motivation behind this discussion is fascination and delight in language differences, not contempt and righteousness.

Now that my hometown team has changed their name to the Cleveland Guardians, I can now support them. Living in Tokyo, this means watching their highlights whenever posted on YouTube. As I type this, the Guardians are 44-25, top of the American League Central Division, and, however weird this is to say as a Clevelander, dominating their opponents. The Guardians are giving me joy and a feeling of confidence that they have the ability to get themselves out of any bind they find themselves in with their ability to score runs when needed. If you know anything about Cleveland sports history, it is weird to feel confident about a Cleveland sports team. Yes, my Cavs finally won a major sports championship in my lifetime, but I wasn’t able to watch the highlights of every game during that run. The Guardians are making me happy 5 to 6 times a week. And even if I am jinxing them by talking about their greatness so early in the season, I will still appreciate this time regardless of what the future brings.

But this piece is not about the Guardians; it’s about the Graphics. And, more so, it’s about the grammar of the graphics the MLB uses to describe stats, particularly the peculiar grammar of RBIs. Note what I did there – RBIs. I made RBI plural. It’s the English grammar of an initialism to treat the initialism like any other noun. This means, even if the initialism itself when not initialized contains a plural, as RBI does in that it stands for ‘Runs Batted In’, the initialism will still be pluralized following the pluralling pattern of most nouns in English, adding an ‘s’ or ‘es’, hence, RBIs. This is how initialisms flow in most Englishes.

Torso image of Venezuelan male baseball player Andrés Giménez running after hitting a home run. He is wearing a white baseball helmet with a chin protector on his right side. There is a blue C on the front of the helmet. He is wearing a blue jersey with CLE in white on the front. He is wearing batting gloves on both hands. Behind him is a light blue fence with a yellow stripe on top. On the fence in white letters is the partial word PROGRESSIVE. You can see many blurry fans clapping and cheering in red and white and blue colors of various Cleveland Guardians paraphernalia. At the bottom there is the following text – a Cleveland red C outline in white; Andrés Giménez; 2-RUN HOME RUN; 3rd HR OF SEASON; 27 RBI FOR SEASON.

However, this is apparently not the style guide of Major League Baseball, aka MLB, forever singular. As you will see in the photo above, MLB will state the number of RBIs but won’t plural RBI. The photo above has the text “27 RBI FOR SEASON”. I do not read it as 27 Runs Batted In For The Season’. I read what is there, “27 RBI FOR SEASON”. Reading that in my head, my variety of English will hear that as “wrong”, making it slightly discomforting to read. I expect it to read ‘27 RBIS FOR SEASON’. 

Now, clearly there is a graphic design problem here that likely encourages MLB graphics to not plural RBI. Seeing ‘RBIS’ is not graphically helpful. We might at first pronounce it ‘ri-bees’ rather than ‘RBIs’. (And, in fact, occasionally announcers do say ‘ri-bees’ when speaking of more than one RBI.) Yet the way to work around this is what MLB graphics does for home runs, aka HRs. As you can also see above, they have the text of home runs as “3rd HR OF SEASON”, using ordinal numbers, not cardinal numbers. In fact, we have two options. Notice the ‘rd’ of the ordinal ‘3rd’ is lowercase. To avoid the reading confusion of ‘RBIS’, MLB graphics could clearly choose ‘RBIs’. Or, they could go ordinal in their numbering, ‘27th RBI OF SEASON.’ 

By choosing ‘27 RBI FOR SEASON’, I am slightly irked each time I read it. But as the field of linguistics has taught me, I know to be very cautious whenever irked by grammar different from my variety of English. When someone else’s grammar “bothers” me by not following my English’s grammar, I have to check myself. The other person’s grammar could be a variant to mine, and mine a variant to their’s. To use another sports example, British grammars allow for collective nouns like teams to be seen as singular or plural. Where I will always say ‘Cleveland is my favorite team’, folks from the UK might be as inclined to say ‘Cleveland are Adam’s favorite team.’ In spite of such sounding weird to me, there is nothing wrong with the latter grammar in British Englishes. The sociolect of British speakers says this and the sociolect of British listeners understands what is said. That is grammar. It’s just not the grammar of my sociolect. 

The problem with ‘27 RBI FOR SEASON’ is that, in spite of my limited corpus, I am pretty sure no one speaks this way. In fact, every announcer I’ve heard when such graphics are displayed says either ‘27 RBIs for the season’ or ‘27 Runs Batted In for the season’ or ‘27 ri-bees for the season’. It’s kind of like how The New Yorker magazine style guide will require more than one cul-de-sac to be written as culs-de-sac because it is a French word so an arbitrary decision has been made to impose the French grammars of plurals even though no one who lives on cul-de-sacs says culs-de-sac. 

I am always open to evidence to the contrary, but unless there is a sociolect that says ‘27 RBI for season’, I’d advocate for the ordinal ‘27th’ to parallel how the MLB style guide treats HRs. But as we learn from linguistics, if MLB keeps 27-RBI-ing, like every grammar and vocabulary difference that emerges in a language, ‘27 RBI’ will eventually become cromulent grammar in English when talking baseball.