Ate Him Up is an expression used in Baseball that describes how a ball gets too difficult for the infielder to handle. This happened when the opposing team hits the ball too hard, that the infielder or outfielder has a difficult time controlling the ball. This is also a bad way of describing how a player executed a bad hop by coming in the field too quickly, without proper timing. This term is more used and associated with the infielders than the outfielders because they're more prone to doing it.
Examples of Ate Him Up
Ate Him Up is also known as "Let it Eat" or "Wormburner", which many baseball enthusiasts are fond of saying. One of the examples is during the All-Star Game with the White Sox pitcher named Chris Sale. He said that he was planning to let everything be eaten after he took a particular place on the baseball field. Ate Him Up is giving everything the player has got, without any reservation, so the opposing infielder will find it difficult to handle the pitch.
Ate Him Up as a Baseball Expression and Jargon
Ate Him Up and Let It Eat are idioms that people can rarely hear during competitions. According to some Baseball players like Jason Castro and Kyle Hendricks, they heard these unpopular phrases when they were in high school, but no one had one bit of idea where these idioms had come from. Another idiom similar to Ate Him Up and Let it Eat is "Let the Big Dog Eat", which was popularized in gold in 1996. Perhaps Cubs Catcher named Miguel Montero had once quoted that every baseball people need to let it eat and do their best in throwing their pitches because anytime the fastball is going to hit them hard until it's too late for them to recover.
Ate Him Up in Other Sports
As mentioned, this expression is quite related to some of other sports idiom, such as letting the dog eat, which was popularized during the Tin Cup in 1993. To ask about the etymology of these idioms, no one seemed to know, yet the purpose of saying these idioms has something to do with the player's masculinity. Although this wasn't the main objective of the players to say such a phrase, still the connotation of the idiom is indexing cultural and muscular discourse. All of these correlated idioms also carry an indirect meaning of controlling the game using brute force.
