in the bag

Example: “With a twenty-point lead, the game was in the bag.”

Origin: The most commonly cited origin traces to American baseball in the 1910s: the New York Giants reportedly held a superstition that carrying the ball bag off the field while ahead in the score would lock in the win, a belief especially associated with their remarkable 26-game winning streak in 1916. A rival theory points instead to hunting, where captured game placed securely in a bag was as good as guaranteed — no longer able to escape. A third, considerably older and less flattering usage circulated in Australia and New Zealand around 1900, where "in the bag" instead described a horse deliberately entered into a race to lose. No source manages to settle definitively which of these, if any, is the true origin of the now-standard, positive sense of a certain, secured success.