"Off His Own Bat."

Off his own bat

Meaning

By an individual's own efforts.

Origin

One question that I've been asked several times about the figurative
expression 'off his own bat' is "should that be 'off his own back'"?
Well no, it shouldn't. 'Off your own back' originated as a mishearing
of the former expression. It has gained sufficient currency to be
considered as a viable everyday alternative of the correct version,
but purists dismiss it as a straightforward error.

Bats come in many forms of course and, as is always the case with such
words when they occur in phrases where the context clear, the meaning
is open to fanciful interpretations. So, as with the yards in 'the
whole nine yards', which are guessed to be any number of things, the
'bat' in 'off his own bat' has been said to be one of these: the
flying mammal, a butter pat, a tool used in brickmaking etc, etc. In
fact, the bat in question is a cricket bat and the first activity that
was said to be done 'off someone's own bat' was to score runs.

The first citation of 'off his own bat' in print comes from the pen of
the celebrated cricket historian and statistician Henry Thomas
Waghorn, in Cricket Scores, 1742:

"The bets on the Slendon man's head that he got 40 notches off his own
bat were lost."

The 'Slendon man' was probably Richard Newland, the star of the
Slindon Cricket Club and cricket's first great all-rounder.

It is worth noting that the phrase is found in print several times
during the next century and all of the known citations are explicit
cricket references - the other supposed derivations of 'bat' in this
context owe everything to imagination and nothing to evidence. There's
an example in Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery, by
Mary Russell Mitford, 1824:

"William Grey got forty notches off his own bat; and that brilliant
hitter Tom Coper gained eight from two successive balls."

Why runs that were scored 'off someone's own bat' were worth
mentioning derives from the arcane rules of cricket. Runs, which were
often referred to as 'notches' in early references to the game, may be
scored in cricket in several different ways. These include various
forms of 'extra' runs, for example, bowling misdemeanours like wides
or no balls; various forms of 'bye', in which the batsmen run without
first hitting the ball; and overthrows, where a fielder throws the
ball at the wicket and misses, giving time for the batsmen to run
again. All of these are counted towards the batting side's score, but
it is the runs that a batsman scores 'off his own bat' that gain kudos
for the player.

The first usage of 'off his own bat' as a figurative, i.e.
non-cricket, phrase is in Fragment on Irish Affairs by the Rev. Sydney
Smith, May 1845:

"Dr. Hodgson is a very worthy, amiable man... but [I] suppose he had
no revenues but what he got off his own bat."