What's happened to the language of baseball?

Walk around the winter meetings and you hear stuff like, "He's a guy with a skill set that will upgrade our product."

Seriously, if Mets GM Steve Phillips ever refers to the players on the Mets roster as the "team" I think I'll pass out. Time and time again, it's the "product."

And, hello, the word "impact" is a noun, not a verb. Not to be a stickler for grammar, but when Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro, a Princeton graduate, says, "I see Matt Lawton impacting our ballclub," I cringe a little bit.

And, honestly, I'm not all that crazy about the term "impact player," thought that's not as bad as the repeated use of the word "upside" (which does not even register as a word on my Microsoft Word thesaurus) to describe just how great a player's potential is. What's wrong with saying, "We think this guy can be a very good player"? Why must we say, "We like this guy's upside"?

If you think a guy's going to hit a lot of home runs, just say it, don't say, "He's got plus power." Which is not to be confused with a guy who you think can hit a real lot of homers, because then he'd have "plus-plus power." And if a guy's a good fielder, he ought to be called a good fielder -- not an "above-average defender."

Former Red Sox manager Joe Morgan used to say stuff like, "I'm the skipper of this nine and we'll be fine if one of our sluggers hits one over the bricks." That's the way baseball guys are supposed to talk. They're not supposed to say, "I'm the field manager of this product and we'll upgrade ourselves if one of our hitters with plus power can show some of that upside."

Is there something I can do about this?

Jeff Bradley is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at jeff.bradley@espnmag.com.