Hit a ball, help a cause
Consider (source):
McCain didn’t help his own cause by uttering the out of touch homily “the fundamentals of our economy remain strong” in the middle of the chaos.
Cursory examination of the Web-as-corpus (thanks, Google) tells me that not help (out) one’s (own) cause seems to be applicable in a reasonably wide range of contexts, though usually involving some sort of conflict, competition, or argumentation. But, without negation, what do you get? Well?
Baseball:
Johnson even helped out his own cause as the only member of the entire Red Sox lineup to record a hit on the day. (source)
After Jason Bartlett struck out, Sonnanstine came to the plate to see if he could help out his own cause with some offense. (source)
And Johnson helped his own cause defensively. Anderson Hernandez led off the bottom of the sixth inning with a chopper up the middle. The ball went off Johnson’s glove and he scurried for it. Johnson picked up the ball and made a diving throw to first baseman Travis Ishikawa, who snagged the low toss. (source)
Santos would help out her own cause with a sacrifice fly into right field that plated Carbonatto and gave the Tigers the one run lead. (source)
When a pitcher advances his team in some way — usually offensively, but apparently also defensively — it’s describable as helping (out) his/her own cause. And it seems that not much else is described that way. It takes some real digging to find something that isn’t baseball (and if it is baseball, it always involves the pitcher doing something good which isn’t pitching; at least, I’ve found nothing to the contrary so far).
Also, maybe I’m in the minority, but I really like it better with the out. Talking with people around me, I’m the only one…but then, I also watch the most baseball of anyone around (this morning).
Is it surprising that positive “help one’s own cause” isn’t that common in the language in general? Maybe not: describing someone as simply “helping their own cause” is might simply be uninformative if the rule is for people to do what is in their interest (not necessarily “selfishly”). Saying “Joe did XYZ” might be just as informative as “Joe helped his own cause by doing XYZ.” Two problems, though
There are situations where you want to emphasize that someone is doing something in alignment with their own goals and not someone else’s (and the expression still seems a bit off); and
Being technically uninformative does not in general lead to ungrammaticality, infelicity, etc. Just to pick an example I thought about last night while ignoring Wheel of Fortune (trust me…I was cooking, and just left the TV on after Jeopardy!), consider contestants introducing themselves on a game show: I’ve been married to my wife Julie for 20 years is normal, I’ve been married to Julie for 20 years is plain odd, though just as informative (assuming only M/F marriages), and I’ve been married to my wife for 20 years is just fine, even though you could just say I’ve been married for 20 years.
Comments(3)
I don’t think there’s any other team sport in which the win/loss record is recorded for any particular team member and, even in baseball, it’s only recorded for the pitcher. Another aspect of the phrase is that it’s used to indicate that the person who helped out his own cause was doing something other than his normal duties. For a pitcher to field the ball or hit the ball successfully is relatively rare and worthy of note. For all the other players fielding and hitting are expected and pitching would not be a possibility.
OK, maybe a football quarterback gets a win/loss record, but the only thing I can think of that would qualify as helping out his own cause would be for him to tackle an opposing player and that would only be possible if he had thrown an interception (not likely to inspire anyone to say that he had helped out his own cause) or if the ball had been fumbled.
Huh, that’s true, about the win/loss record. I thought that maybe soccer goalkeepers were sometimes assigned a win/loss/(tie?) record, but I don’t know if stats are even all that important in the soccer world. I’ll bet there are endless debates about who of pitchers, quarterbacks, goalkeepers, etc are most responsible for the outcome of their team’s win or loss.
seems to me that “help one’s cause” involves stating something that should be obvious or taken as a given, as a way of pointing out something out of the ordinary. Must be other things like that…
I’d agree that the point is that the pitcher generally wins the game by (a) pitching well and (b) getting run support. So when he makes a great play or hits a homer, he’s doing something unusual to help himself out. I believe it’s that unusualness that leads to the phrase being used. You’d never say “Johnson helped his own cause by pitching a no-hitter”, for instance.