*change* + preposition

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 22:57:18 -0500, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
wrote:

>At 9:39 PM -0500 3/18/05, James C Stalker wrote:
>>I don't watch baseball much, but I did watch some of the World Series.
>>The announcers in describing pitches and pitching strategies would say
>>something like "he threw (or should have thrown) a change up."  So what
>>is a change up and how might it fit into this discussion?
>>
>A slow pitch, released with the same motion as a faster pitch.
>Crucially, the batter is presumed to be expecting a fastball, and the
>pitcher "changes up" on him.  You color analysts can decide how it
>fits into the discussion, I'm just the play-by-play guy.

Baseball has many expressions for such off-speed pitches-- see this post:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0412A&L=ads-l&P=R2187

As far as I can tell, "change-up" originated in the expression "change of
pace", a term for a pitcher's mixture of fast and slow pitches.  So a
pitcher would "change it up" (i.e., change the pace) with a slower pitch,
and this was eventually nominalized as "change-up".

The phrasal verb "change (it) up" in this context is similar to "mix (it)
up" or "switch (it) up", in the sense of skillfully varying one's approach
to keep opponents off-balanced or confused.  These are common expressions
in various sports (not to mention in hiphop usage when a rapper is
bragging about lyrical agility).


--Ben Zimmer