William Safire is on vacation. In sports, there is a great deal of talk about what might have been. But they don't always say it like that. Let me hasten to point out that the moment in question is over.
Baseball pitchers live regret-filled lives, and their postgame comments provide many examples.
If I get it a little inside or a little outside, maybe he gets a hit, but probably not a home run. To a historian of the language, the emergence of a new meaning for an old tense is an earth-shaking event, and yet the counterfactual present tense has sneaked into usage without notice. But it occurs most often in baseball, a game that habitually offers from its humdrum rhythm a pivotal moment for our contemplation, a crisis in which a single player stands alone as hero or goat. How the new construction came about is not at all obvious. Linguistic change usually involves a gradual mechanism.