Doonsbury cartoon at Slate: Kim asks Mike, “How’s your mom?”

Mike: hard to say.  She may or may not have fractured her hip while line dancing with the notorious Crenshaw brothers who have now moved out to the farm to wait on her hand and foot until she recovers.
Kim: Wow!  Your mom still brings it!
Mike: Please don’t say that.

Brings it gets a number of googlits in this idiom.  “Justin of JustinTV brings it.” This high school sports headline “Shadle ‘brings it’” (with brings it in quotes).  Access Hollywood Blog says that “Hayden brings it”

I suppose this could be short for “brings it on.” But the context suggests a shade difference. 

Anyone heard of this?

edit: better link to the Doonesbury cartoon in question [I think]

Nothing to do with “bring it on”; this is originally baseball terminology, where “he (really) brings it” is said of a hard-throwing pitcher. By extension, therefore, it’s used here as a more colorful variant of “She’s still got it.”

No, I’ve never seen it either. Is it in origin perhaps an abbreviated “brings it home”?

How about short for “brings his A game”?

How about short for “brings his A game”?

Unlikely, since it’s specifically for pitchers.  I suppose “brings it (home)” is possible, but I’ve never seen or heard the longer form.  I suspect it’s simply a phrase some long-forgotten announcer used that caught on because it sounds good.

Aren’t you being a little picky, LH? “Brings it (home)” is not that much different than “bringing his/her A game”, or “brings his/her talent”. Whomever invented it must have had something like that in mind. It may have started in baseball, but it had to have a root elsewhere for that announcer.

By the way, what year is “brings it” related to a baseball pitcher? I couldn’t find anything on it.

Left-handed reliever C.J. Wilson, a relentless student of pitching and all things baseball, may be the guy who brings it. March of this year.

Said of a Cleveland Indians outfielder, “But the best thing about Grady [Sizemore] is he brings it every day.”

“So I’ll state the obvious: I have no control over whether or not Josh Fields brings it, or whether the umpires call pitches in his favor.” February of this year.

from a 2005 blog:

What a terrific performance by Roy O tonight. He has become one of my favorite pitchers (and I am not an Astros fan). Tonight he was just relentless, pounding that fastball in, in, in, and making a very good hitting Cardinals team look weak. He is not all that big, and doesn’t look like he could throw that hard, but he really brings it, and knows how to pitch.

Brings it home would not make sense in reference to a pitcher.

The earliest cite I found was 2001, but seems to be an anomaly.  The google hits seem to cluster in 2006-2007.

"Brings it home” would mean pitching the ball over ‘home’ plate, Oecolampadius. It makes perfect sense regarding what LH is saying. It doesn’t make sense re your quoted phrase, but the meaning has probably changed over the years.

Aren’t you being a little picky, LH? “Brings it (home)” is not that much different than “bringing his/her A game”, or “brings his/her talent”. Whomever invented it must have had something like that in mind. It may have started in baseball, but it had to have a root elsewhere for that announcer.

Huh?  The whole point of this forum is to be picky.  If you’re going to be satisfied with X being “not that much different” than Y, what’s the point of asking questions here, or doing any research?  “Brings it” is not that much different from “brings it on"—and yet they’re entirely different, and the one is certainly not from the other.  You’ve invented two other possible extensions and are saying “Well, you can’t prove it’s not from one of them, so let’s just assume that the inventor ‘must have had something like that in mind.’” What’s the point of that?  I don’t get it.

By the way, what year is “brings it” related to a baseball pitcher? I couldn’t find anything on it.

Unfortunately, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (at least my edition) doesn’t have citations for the phrase, but it does include it ("To throw a pitch with great velocity"), and it’s copyright 1989, so there’s a terminus ante quem.

HDAS has a 1975 citation for bring it in the baseball sense.

New Partridge has 1998 for bring it on.

brilliant Dave.  Thanks.

Dave Wilton - 18 June 2007 05:59 AM

New Partridge has 1998 for bring it on.

That seems implausibly late, and the online OED has it from 1980.

There was an awful movie released in 2000 called “Bring it on”.  So I expect the term is much older.

Like Dr. T said, it’s attested from 1980.