Call balls and strikes?

Reader question:

Please explain “call balls and strikes” in this sentence: I’m glad I’m at an outlet like MS NOW that wants us to call balls and strikes and say what we find.

My comments:

Formerly known as MSNBC, MS Now is one of the major news networks in America.

The speaker at MS Now is happy that they’re allowed to go out, investigate and report what they find, warts and all.

Warts and all?

That means the whole thing, including the bad parts.

Both the positive and the negative, in other words.

Put another way, they’re allowed to report everything without having to hide anything.

Without censorship, that is, without pressure.

That is as it should be, I may add.

Anyway, it is a good thing that journalists are allowed to call balls and strikes, tell a spade as a spade, and make no bones about it.

To be allowed to call balls and strikes is an analogy to the game of baseball. In baseball, it is an umpire’s job to literally call balls and strikes.

“Ball” refers to a pitch that goes out of bounds, or out of the designated area. To the pitcher or thrower, “ball” is a bad ball, so to speak. To the batter or hitter, a “ball” is a good thing.

Whenever a “ball” is thrown, the umpire call out loud – so that every audience in the park can hear – “Ball”.

“Strike”, on the other hand, refers to a good strong pitch that hits the target area and evades the bat. To the pitcher, this is a good thing. To the batter, this is bad.

And whenever a “strike” occurs, the umpire shouts: “Hike” (not “Strike” – for “Hike” sounds like “Strike” but clearer in a big, noisy, vociferous stadium).

In short, for the umpire to call balls and strikes, literally, is for the umpire to call a ball a ball and call a strike a strike, i.e. call everything objectively.

Hence, as an idiom, to call balls and strikes is to call a spade a spade, to make a judgment without prejudice or bias.

In our example, the speaker is happy that they’re allowed to do so.

Happily for them, I may add, because in today’s world, all sorts of interest groups try to influence the media, so much so that truly objective reporting is hard to come by.

Don’t worry about that for now, though. Now, let’s read a few media examples of situations in which “calling balls and strikes” are aptly used:

1. Your World anchor Neil Cavuto devoted a segment at the close of his show Thursday to addressing President Donald Trump‘s anti-Fox News comments, telling the president, “My job is to cover you, not to fawn over you or rip you, just report on you, to call balls and strikes on you.” Watch the video below.

“It is called ‘fair and balanced,’ Mr. President,” Cavuto added, “yet it is fair to say you are not a fan when the balance includes stuff you don’t like to hear or facts you don’t like to have questioned. You are only human, I get that. Who likes to be corrected? But you are the president. It comes with the job – just like checking what you say and do comes with my job.

“After all,” he continued, “I am not the one who said tariffs are a wonderful thing. You are. I am not the one who said Mexico would pay for the wall. You did. Just like I am not the one who claimed that Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 election. You did. I am sorry you do not like these facts being brought up, but they are not fake because I did. What would be fake is if I never did.”

- Fox News Anchor Rebukes Donald Trump’s Over Criticism Of Network: “It Is Called ‘Fair And Balanced,’ Mr. President”, Deadline.com, August 29, 2019.

2. The 2024 Presidential Election was such a weird one that we'll be performing a postmortem on it for years to come. A lot of people will regret the decisions they made when they stepped into the voting booth that day, and Stephen A. Smith is one of them.

To his credit, Smith is willing to call balls and strikes to a degree when it comes to politics, and he has no problem admitting that he made an error when he voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Smith was a guest on The Sage Steele Show, and Steele asked him why he had previously said he regretted voting for Harris.

“I am completely and adamantly against one-party rule. If you’re in the White House, I want the other party in the House or the Senate,” he said. “I don’t like total complete dominion on one side of the aisle. I’m just very, very fixated on that. I can’t stand that.”

Alright, I can understand that, but Smith said that, despite Harris securing the nomination without a primary and lacking historical evidence of viability, he believed she would be more willing to work with the other side.

“So I know all of that, but I also believed that she was the kind of person that, if the power existed in one house of Congress, if not both, that she was somebody that you could get to acquiesce and work across the aisle in order to get things done,” he continued. “That was my belief.”

Of course, acquiescing is easy when you don’t really have any kind of policies you want to fight for.

It’s like getting brownie points for letting your wife pick the restaurant when, truthfully, you were so hungry you didn’t care where you went and would have eaten at Golden Corral if you had to.

- Stephen A. Smith Admits Regret After Kamala Harris Vote In 2024 Election, by Mart Reigle, April 1, 2026.

3. U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) agreed with the action President Donald Trump took in Iran, but he stopped short of endorsing his messaging.

In particular, an Easter Sunday message where the president warned “a whole civilization will die” unless “something revolutionarily wonderful” occurred.

“President Trump has had a history of communicating the way he’s communicating, and so I’m not gonna call balls and strikes on his communication,” McCormick said, noting he would communicate differently from the president.

Six weeks into the conflict, McCormick said the president and the military are achieving their goals to force Iran to give up its uranium stockpile and a path to a nuclear weapon. That’s much further than a Kamala Harris administration would’ve got, he said.

But he said the war is now at a fork in the road. As the United States holds a shaky ceasefire, Iran must decide to sit down for negotiations or continue on a military path. Still, McCormick said it’s unlikely Americans will see boots on the ground.

“I would not be supportive of a large deployment of boots on the ground,” McCormick said. “I think the American people aren’t ready for that.”

- McCormick ‘not gonna call balls and strikes’ on Trump’s language, AOL.com, April 12, 2026.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）