Word.ws English Dictionary

come to bat

come to bat verb: to have one's turn at bat.

Verb

come to bat (third-person singular simple present comes to bat, present participle coming to bat, simple past came to bat, past participle come to bat)

  1. To have one's turn at bat.
    • In that case, the player who was called out for failure to come to bat properly is charged with having been put out, and whatever happened that resulted in the improper batter being put out goes into the scoring box of the batter who failed to bat in proper turn.2015, Andres Wirkmaa, The Complete Baseball Scorekeeping Handbook, →ISBN
    • New Zealand stuck doggedly to a plan that centred on batting patience. Henry Nicholls' 55, and 47 from Tom Latham, held things together in the face of some probing England bowling.
      The value of the Black Caps' pragmatism in reaching 241-8 was shown when England came to bat.2019 July 14, Stephan Shemilt, “England win Cricket World Cup: Ben Stokes stars in dramatic finale against New Zealand”, in BBC Sport, London
  2. To argue in defense of.
    • Unfortunately, if anybody above [the manager] or around her cared, they didn't come to bat for me.2012, Leslie Neal-Boylan, Nurses With Disabilities: Professional Issues and Job Retention, →ISBN

Forms of come to bat

third-person singular presentcomes to bat
present participlecoming to bat
pastcame to bat
past participlecome to bat

Questions about come to bat

What does come to bat mean?
Come to bat means to have one's turn at bat.
What part of speech is come to bat?
Come to bat is a verb.
What is the past tense of come to bat?
The past tense of come to bat is came to bat.

Words near come to bat in the dictionary

  1. come to a stand
  2. come to a sticky end
  3. come to a stop
  4. come to an end
  5. come to anchor
  6. come to bat
  7. come to be
  8. come to bed
  9. come to blows
  10. come to find out
  11. come to fruition

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: come to bat (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-come to bat.wav.

Cite this entry: “come to bat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/come_to_bat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.