The Most Annoying Phrases In Sports

Welcome to Part 1 of a (hopefully) ongoing series, in which I write about the often-used sports terms that make me the angriest, thus making me even angrier. It's not the healthiest practice, blood pressure-wise, but away I go:

-"Running the point." This term bothers me because it involves inventing an object that doesn't exist. Just because you are a point guard doesn't mean that there needs to be something called "the point." We don't feel the need to say that quarterbacks are "running the quarter," do we? Sure, we do refer to slot receivers as being "in the slot" or second basemen as being "at second," but those are actual, physically defined locations on the field. "The point" is...wherever the point guard goes, I guess? That's too nebulous for me, and it's much more accurate to say that the point is nowhere. Let's leave it that way, shall we?

-"Pitching and defense wins baseball games." You can't do this. There are, arguably, two really important aspects of baseball (pitching and hitting), and two less important ones (defense and baserunning). The implication of this term is that pitching and defense are more important than hitting, but that's a senseless comparison; you're pitting two dimensions of baseball against one. Sure, pitching does seem to have a slight edge over hitting as the single most important facet of the game, but it seems very possible that hitting and baserunning combined are more important than pitching alone. Or that pitching and baserunning are more important than hitting. In fact, why drag defense into it at all? If your argument is that great pitching beats great hitting, it almost weakens it when you make it seem as though you have to throw something else in there to make it hold up. Hey, did you know that Barry Bonds and Rafael Belliard combined have more career home runs than Albert Pujols?

While I do die a little inside whenever I hear phrases such as these, they pale in comparison to what I am dubbing the 2008 Meaningless Sports Phrase Of The Year:

-"Dink and dunk." If 2007 was the year of "it is what it is," 2008 is the year of dink and dunk. I'm not sure what it is that caused this phrase to explode in popularity. Maybe it's the fact that 2007's two best quarterbacks are either sidelined or less effective in '08, making short passes a more popular strategy. Maybe it's the fact that Chad Pennington became semirelevant when he switched teams this offseason. Regardless, "dink and dunk" is here, and it's not going away.

So, what makes "dink and dunk" so infuriating? Two things. First: it's meaningless. Sure, I'll get your point if you use it in a sentence, but the words themselves are completely arbitrary. Do short passes make a "dink" sound when they fall into the hands of running backs/slot receivers? It seems unlikely.

Secondly, there is an even shorter and easier term for the same thing that is NOT meaningless: "short passes." It's kind of beautiful in its simplicity, isn't it? So why do we need a nonsense term for the same thing? We don't. If nothing else comes of this Poop on Boozer post (and I firmly believe that will be the case), I'm hoping for a yearlong moratorium on "dink and dunk."