"A year ago, we don't win tonight".
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Ron Stack writes:
Here is Manager Terry Collins on the Mets' victory over the Marlins last night: “A year ago, we don’t win tonight. It’s a different mentality in our clubhouse now."
I'm almost certain LL has covered this time-shifted present tense but since I don't even know what to call it I couldn't do much of a search.
So, what is it? And why does it sound right but look strange? And why does it seem (anecdotally, anyway) to be so popular among coaches and managers?
This seems to be a implicit form of what we've called "baseball conditionals" — see
"Baseball conditionals", 5/23/2007
"The baseball conditional in the Zombie Mohammed case", 2/26/2012
where we discussed cases like
He just did a little damage control in that situation, we're OK.
I'm a Muslim, I find it offensive.
As Barbara Partee pointed out, such examples can be characterized as
Clause1, clause 2. — both plain indicatives.
Interpretation: if clause 1 had been the case, clause 2 would have been the case.
In Terry Collins' quote, the first "clause" is just an temporal adjunct "A year ago" — but this effectively might have been something like "If it's a year ago". And other adjuncts work just as well as paratactic protases: "With X pitching", "In the old ballpark", etc.
I observed that such paratactic counterfactual (if referring to past events) or hypothetical (if referring to future or generic events) constructions are common in Elmore Leonard's dialogue, reflecting their frequency in everyday American English in general. And I suggested that
I don't think there's any special connection between the national pastime and paratactic conditionals of this kind, whether counterfactual or otherwise. But baseball is an activity where post-game counterfactual reasoning is half the fun, and it's carried out by the same kind of (vernacular American) people that Elmore Leonard writes dialogue for.
As for why it "sounds right but looks strange", that's normal for things that we often say but don't usually write.
Update — As some commenters have pointed out, there are two interesting things about this example: the periphrastic counterfactual conditional, and the odd tense and time reference. These are connected, I think, though some further analysis is needed on both dimensions.
Eli Nelson said,
April 17, 2015 @ 11:03 am
This is the sort of funny phrasing that I would expect in the context of sports discussion, but it makes as much sense as any other kind of counterfactual.
James said,
April 17, 2015 @ 11:05 am
Right, although
"If it had been a year ago we wouldn't have won tonight"
doesn't make sense. He must have meant, if the team had been in the state that it was a year ago, then they wouldn't have won that tonight — uh, that night, whichever one he was talking about — the point is, 'tonight' just has it's regular indexical function.
Belial Issimo said,
April 17, 2015 @ 3:59 pm
We're talking, we don't notice it. It's written down, it's suddenly a big deal.
Mark S said,
April 17, 2015 @ 6:19 pm
There used to be an ad on TV where a cancer survivor says "Ten years ago, I wouldn't be standing here right now." Doesn't stand up logically, but you know what she meant.
Ted McClure said,
April 17, 2015 @ 9:14 pm
When spoken, isn't there a New York/Yiddish lilt that makes it clear what we mean? The first clause rises, the second falls. Without that I might misunderstand.
](myl) My intuition is that this is possible but not obligatory.]
Mike said,
April 18, 2015 @ 1:25 am
I agree with Mark S and James that this question isn't about the 'baseball conditional' per se (although that plays a role in an explanation of the semantics of the sentence), but rather the use of "tonight" to refer to a night a year ago—more like the reference shift of the indexicals in "I go to bed around now every night" or "this week last year, my grandmother died."
Yuval said,
April 18, 2015 @ 5:00 am
@Mike: I think you misinterpreted James, and that he has it right and Mark S and you have it wrong: it's not referring to "this night last year", but to the regular "tonight". The "a year ago" stands for "being in the condition we were in a year ago", and everything else in the sentence is ordinary. Well, other than that baseball conditional.
Jonathan Mayhew said,
April 18, 2015 @ 9:41 am
Right, it means. "Under the conditions we faced tonight, the type of game it was, our team as it existed last year would not have won." Or more simply: "last year we didn't win games similar to this one." There is no sense that it is exactly a year ago.
Jerry Friedman said,
April 18, 2015 @ 3:31 pm
It's hard to tell since I saw it in writing first, but I think that if I'd heard it first, I'd still think it was funny—not because of the "baseball conditional", but because of the garden-path suggestion that tonight happened last year. I believe that kind of thing used to be called a "bull" (PC version).
PVanderwaart said,
April 19, 2015 @ 11:50 am
IIRC, William Safire wrote a column about what he dubbed the "sports present" tense. It was based on analysis of a statement by Keith Hernandez which went something like "if he throws a slider there, he gets me out."
BZ said,
April 20, 2015 @ 12:08 pm
Hmm, the phrase only makes sense to me if the "tonight" game is still in the future (or at least is ongoing and hasn't been won yet). Otherwise "A year ago we wouldn't win tonight" would be required.
Oona Houlihan said,
April 20, 2015 @ 12:20 pm
I am not sure if e.g. Einstein would have agreed this to be "counterfactual". Both "tenses" are factual in some sense. With "tonight" referring to "exactly" e.g. 365 days ago the speaker takes a little liberty but essentially in my opinion does nothing more strange than, though kind of elliptically, refer to something like "on this very day, a year ago" … or am I mistaken?