Off base

A Virginia lawmaker wants to improve off-base living conditions for enlisted troops with families.

The hippo heard us, and, like a baseball player caught off base, tried to get back to the river.

Near-synonyms: off-track, off target

But he's off-base in describing the city as having "record crime" until he took office.

Near-synonyms: off-track, off target, off-kilter

Verne had been dead for 64 years by the time of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 and was thus spared the embarrassment of knowing . . . that part of the rocket would be named “Columbia,” not his own ludicrously off-base suggestion, “Columbiad.”

That partisan rhetoric may be heated, but it's not entirely off base.