BP Daily Podcast: Effectively Wild Episode 518: Your Emails Mean Business

"Command and control" (as one phrase) is actually a military term. It's a little vague but it's something like: a measure of the effectiveness of a commander to utilize the full capacity of his forces and, conversely, those forces' ability to stay in line. It's widely used among military and security analysts.

My bet would be that the military phrase came first and that it slowly seeped into baseball language -- especially if baseball was using "command" first, and then started adding "control". If I had to guess, I'd say the phrase gained traction in military circle in the 1980s.

If this is right it's a new twist on my pet peeve about the way the military has become so tied up in baseball.