Apologies in advance for the following “inside baseball” discussion:
Indeed 球威 is mysterious especially when translated into English as “pitcher’s stuff”. I’m a (very) casual baseball fan and hadn’t heard that term. Wikipedia says:
A pitcher’s “stuff” is an overall evaluation of how effective his pitches are; it is “good stuff” when the pitches are difficult to hit, and usually just “stuff” or sometimes even “lousy stuff” when the pitches are poor.
So.
But I was thinking about all the baseball-related terms here on WK including two for “sacrifice fly” (犠飛 and 犠打). I looked up the word on Wikipedia and found it listed there as 犠牲フライ, although 犠飛 was listed as an alternate term. 犠打 is better translated as “sacrifice bunt” apparently. I’ll send that in as a suggested revision.
I discussed all this baseball vocabulary with my (admittedly-non-baseball-fan but very Japanese wife) who mentioned that before World War Two, baseball in Japan used a lot of words that came from English (e.g. ダブルプレイ). During the war, with anti-American sentiment running high, Japanese baseball switched to using native Japanese words (e.g. 併殺). But postwar, it’s mainly loanwords that are used. I am in no position to judge how true that is because I don’t follow Japanese baseball or listen to the commentary, but it’s quite possible that some of the terms we’re learning here aren’t particularly useful even if you did follow Japanese baseball. Not that it hurts to learn them. I mean it probably hurts a bit if you don’t care at all about baseball…
)