Help me with possessives

Then we'll have the silly debate on using boys' and girls' because of men's and women's.

 

Yes. The "swap the city for the team name" rule is a pretty safe bet.

Just keep in mind that having a "the" in front of the team name doesn't automatically make it a possessive noun. For instance, "The Cardinals pitchers are weary..." works as well as "The Cardinals' pitchers are weary...", since in the first instance "Cardinals" is an adjective that qualifies "pitchers". Really, it's just up to personal taste/whether or not adding an apostrophe would make the sentence look awkward.

 

helpful...thanks

 

Never. It should be Sox's. I think that's how AP does it. However, Boston or Chicago papers might do it their own way, particularly in headlines, but it's not grammatically correct at all.

 

But I would argue that, at least grammatically, to use Cardinal as an adjective, it would be singular. The Cardinal pitchers.

 

The team's name is the Cardinals. So unless you're using it as a noun (ex: "Albert Pujols is a Cardinal"), you always need to have the "s" at the end. Unless it's Stanford you're talking about.

 

Only if you're talking about Stanford's baseball team.

The contemporary thinking is to go plural, under the premise that there's more than one of 'em.

Plus, it usually just sounds better to the ear for most people: Mets manager Terry Collins vs. Met manager Terry Collins. Under the same premise, sometimes it helps to add a "the" to the sentence for clarity.

 

False parallelism. There are no such words as mens and womens.

Now, if you want to make the grammar argument that it therefore should be men basketball, well, that's a different matter entirely for linguists.

 

Not piling on. just wanted to add my .02 that this is correct. and not only correct, but 1,000,000 percent correct. 8)

 

What if the school has a Kool-Ade team?

 

OK, is all this right....

The Cardinals' Albert Pujols is very good.
Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols is good.
The Brewers' Prince Fielder, the Yankees' Bartolo Colon and the Nationals' Livan Hernandez are the fattest players in baseball.
Cardinals fans rioted when Albert Pujols signed with the Cubs.

But...

Milwaukee's Prince Fielder is fat.
Milwaukee first baseman Prince Fielder is fat.

Are both those right?

This is great. I feel like one of the recurring stress factors of my day has been lifted!

 

Fielder sentences are wrong. He's big-boned.