wire-to-wire
今日は気づけばひとりでここまでpostしていますね。明後日は神奈川県の採用試験。言わずがもなですか。
MLB オールスター戦にダルビッシュ有投手がぎりぎりで選出されました。チームの思惑（戦略）があったようですが、まずはおめでたいことです。
Darvish and Freese win, going to All-Star Game
Rangers pitcher Yu Darvish and Cardinals third baseman David Freese are each headed to their first All-Star Game, thanks to a 2012 All-Star Game MLB.com Final Vote Sponsored by Firestone in which fans smashed online voting records and put a giant exclamation point on an unprecedented Major League Baseball balloting campaign.
The 83rd All-Star Game is scheduled to be played Tuesday in Kansas City, and Darvish and Freese have been added to the 34th and final spots on each roster. Darvish becomes the eighth Rangers player for the American League and Texas manager Ron Washington, and for Freese it reunites the 2011 World Series MVP with his former Cardinals manager, National League skipper Tony La Russa, who is coming out of retirement just for the Midsummer Classic.
Darvish joins Hideki Matsui (2004) and Hideki Okajima (2007) as Japanese winners on the AL side of the Final Vote. The right-hander was a wire-to-wire winner, holding off a gallant bid by White Sox veteran Jake Peavy. That pair was followed in order by righties Jason Hammel of the Orioles, Jonathan Broxton of the Royals and Ernesto Frieri of the Angels.
http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20120705&content_id=34501604&vkey=news_mlb&c_id=mlb
wire-to-wire（「最初から首位独走の」）は面白い表現です。まさかまたパカパカからだとは思いもしませんでした。少し長くなりますが、私がよく利用するWorldwide Words Webの「down the wire」の項に関連表現としてその成り立ちがありました。どうぞ！（UG）
We use down to the wire for any situation which is tense because its outcome may not be decided until the very last moment.
It’s a favourite phrase of commentators in most sports pretty much everywhere in the English-speaking world and it has been borrowed for any problematic situation, especially in business and politics. An example in the Birmingham Post in April 2003 referred to football, but in a more melancholic sense: “I would say the future is quite bright for Notts County but simply because of the complexities of bringing a football club out of administration, the number of hoops we have to jump through, it could go right down to the wire”.
The origin is indeed in sport, though not football but horse-racing. American racetracks in the latter part of the nineteenth century — before the days of cameras — had a wire strung across the track above the finishing line to help stewards decide which nose had got across the line first. An early example appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in July 1889: “As the end of the stand was reached Timarch worked up to Petrel, and the two raced down to the ‘wire,’ cheered on by the applause of the spectators. They ended the first half mile of the race head and head, passing lapped together under the wire, and beginning in earnest the mile which was yet to be traversed”. So, a race that was undecided until the very last moment was said to go down to the wire.
Another wire was often placed across the track at the starting post to help check for false starts; this led to another expression: from wire to wire, from the starting post to the finishing line, hence from end to end of a contest. When you are under the wire, you’re at the finishing line, figuratively at the last possible opportunity or just in time.
