Get To The Bottom Of: "Can Of Corn"

Barber would refer to a lazy fly ball that is easy to catch as a can of corn, but the phrase predated him. Barber didn't get his first broadcasting gig until January of 1930, when he filled in for a professor who was ill to read aloud a paper on bovine obstetrics. (I'm not making that up.) But the phrase has been found to be used in interviews with ballplayers as far back as the mid 1920s.

Like a lot of baseball slang, it has since been extended to refer to any particularly easy task. As such, it has been suggested that it originated because catching a fly ball was as easy as "opening a can of corn" but per Dickson's Baseball Dictionary, the more accepted origin is more interesting....

It used to be that grocers had very high shelves. If a customer wanted something from a high shelf, they would call a grocer boy over who had a very long stick with a hook on the end. The boy would reach up with the stick and tip the item backwards off the shelf, where he would catch it with his hands or in his apron like a net. Thus, catching a very high fly ball was like the grocer boy catching that "can of corn" off the shelf.