to play ball
33
4.6
- phrasal verb
- Informal
:
colaborar
- And you're gonna have to play ball with the Republicans to get anything done.
- let's play ball
- willing to play ball
- want to play ball
OK Ukraine, you got to play ball, OK?
- OK Ukraine, you got to play ball, OK?
- It it, it brings people in who are brilliant, and then it takes the ones of those who are willing to play ball with the engines of power.
- The chances of you ever getting to a level of hierarchy or leadership are pretty, pretty slim to none because you didn't play ball, you didn't play the game.
- And suddenly, man, there's some realism, OK, there's somebody else playing ball here.
Examples
-
Let's play ball!
-
Come on, let's play ball!
-
Tell him Bill wants to play ball this weekend.
-
We're gonna get Mom back for you, but we gotta play ball.
Fiction book (1996) -
Play ball with me and I'll play ball with you.
-
You play ball and I promise, I'll stop him before he kills you.
-
Let's play ball.
-
"We've been waiting for Amazon to play ball with libraries since they came out with the Kindle," Ms. Newman said.
Blog text (9) -
Oregon's government is controlled by the public employee unions—you play ball under union rules or you go away.
Blog text (6) -
If everyone agrees to the plan, we can play ball and start working together effectively.
Synonyms
54
4.2
To agree or pretend to agree to avoid trouble
5
3.2
To work well with other people in a team
Antonyms
How Cooperative
Surface Forms
Morphology
play + ball
The literal words 'play' and 'ball' evoke participating in a game and thus imply following rules or engaging with others, but the specific idiomatic sense 'to act cooperatively / agree to work with others' is a metaphorical extension rather than a direct composition. This meaning is partially inferable from the constituents but not fully predictable for a B1 learner without prior exposure, so it is only partly transparent.
Etymology
Play ball may come from children's games or baseball: to play with a ball you join the game and follow its rules. So, it now means 'to agree to work with others' or 'to cooperate'.