"small ball" meaning in English

See small ball in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: En-au-small ball.ogg Forms: smallball [alternative]
Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} small ball (uncountable)
  1. (baseball, slang) A baseball strategy that relies on baserunning, singles, and hitting for average rather than hitting home runs. Tags: slang, uncountable
    Sense id: en-small_ball-en-noun-q-KdQR9q Categories (other): Baseball, English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 75 25 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 86 14 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 73 27 Topics: ball-games, baseball, games, hobbies, lifestyle, sports
  2. (figurative) Any strategy that involves proceeding by small increments. Tags: figuratively, uncountable
    Sense id: en-small_ball-en-noun-vi8EZynC

Alternative forms

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Download raw JSONL data for small ball meaning in English (2.4kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-03-25 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-03-03 using wiktextract (05c257f and 9d9a410). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.