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Guest Posted 21 years ago
Vocabulary

You can't tell the players without a scorecard.

What does this phrase mean (not literally)? In what situations do you use it?
Thank you.
  

Top answer

Hello, Guest! A wild guess: You have to know what the persons in question have achieved before figuring them out?

— Pieanne

  • Hello, Guest!
  • A wild guess: You have to know what the persons in question have achieved before figuring them out?
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14 Answers
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Hello, Guest!
A wild guess: You have to know what the persons in question have achieved before figuring them out?
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Yes, but it is often applied more generally: you can't fully appreciate or understand a situation/event/place etc. without basic information about its nature/function/context etc.
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Is this an idiom or does it fall under another name, please?
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Thank you for the explanation.
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0 I'd call it an idiom, and I'd use it to describe a scene of confusion involving many different people, a scene in which something is being accomplished because the players know their roles thoroughly but in which the outsider is totally confused from his lack of understanding of the process. 02br
02br
00It's possible that I've been using the expression incorrectly, of cours
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so, is everyone here to young to know this came from old-time baseball?... here's how it started:

the folks way up in the bleachers were too far away to see the faces of the players, but because the numbers on their uniforms were readable from afar, they'd consult their scorecards to see who was who... the team was listed there by name and number...

btw, this is a nifty site.
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Maia, why don't you register and join the fun? Emotion: smile We help aspiring speakers as well as writers of English, native and otherwise, and
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At baseball games in the 20th century the sellers of scorecards at the ballparks would yell "get your scorecards here, you can't tell the players without a scorecard". The meaning is that someone watching the game from the stands could not identify the players without a scorecard that listed the players name and position along with his uniform number.
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The phrase is from baseball where vendors at the stadiums tried to sell their scorecards (a paper brochure which includes the roster of each of the teams playing with their names, numbers, position and occasionally statistics, as well as a few articles and advertising) to fans by shouting the phrase. Those were the days before names appeared on the player's shirt, only a number. "Now batting for
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