I heard an announcer on a baseball game exclaim excitedly (is that redundant? Can one exclaim something in a bored monotone? And is "bored monotone" redundant? Too many questions?) that a centerfielder "simply outran the baseball" in tracking down a long flyball.
Well, first of all, a 9-month old can outrun a baseball. I mean, really, set them both down at a starting line and put their favorite chewing implement 2 feet away and see who gets there first.
But even in the opposite figurative sense it is wrong. A batted ball, hit in the air to the outfield can never be "outrun" by a human, because the baseball is moving way faster than any human has ever run, it just happens to be moving downward.
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