Lauren Martinez was enjoying a problem-free Saturday evening, watching her beloved Houston Astros beat the New York Yankees to reach baseball’s World Series, when it happened, again.

A sportscaster dropped a “Houston, we have a problem” reference. This time, it was a play on words by Fox Sports’ Tom Verducci during the American League Championship Series trophy celebration: “Houston, tonight we have no problems. Houston, your team is going to the World Series!”

Tom Hanks in the film 'Apollo 13'

“I literally groaned,” says Ms. Martinez, 32 years old, from Humble, Texas. “You are so happy, and suddenly, so incensed.”

Houston has a problem, all right. It’s people who still think “Houston, we have a problem” is a clever turn of phrase.

The line—a misquote of the actual 1970 warning from an Apollo 13 astronaut to mission control in Houston—comes up ad infinitum, especially in newspaper headlines and sports broadcasts.

That’s annoying to many Houstonians, and others, who consider it the laziest of clichés.

“Houston, we have a problem” resurfaced with regularity when the Astros nearly squandered the ALCS series against the Yankees last week before pulling it out in the decisive Game 7.

The often misquoted line from Apollo 13 astronauts—"OK, Houston, we’ve had a problem here"—comes up a lot in everyday life, and that annoys a lot of Houstonians. Photo: NASA

Should a problem arise in the World Series between the Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston knows it will be subjected to “Houston, we have a problem,” again and again. The Astros won a 7-6 thriller Wednesday night to tie the series at 1-1.

Fox Sports, which is broadcasting the World Series, and Mr. Verducci, who is again part of its crew, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A LexisNexis search shows that “Houston, we have a problem” has shown up in more than 12,000 news articles and broadcasts since 1982, and on at least 10 occasions in this newspaper. Part of the reason it is so overused, Houstonians suspect, is that it is one of the few things most Americans can readily recall about the nation’s fourth-largest city, which is home to 2.3 million.

“Much of this country is going to look like Houston by 2050, and people here feel pretty good about living here,” said Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociologist who has surveyed the city’s changing demographics and attitudes for 36 years. “But no one knows much about us.”

A Twitter account called @UghHouston is devoted to chronicling offending uses of “Houston, we have a problem,” and chastising guilty parties to do better.

Rakesh Agrawal, chief executive of SnapStream Inc., a Houston-based software company that records thousands of hours of broadcasts and feeds clips to late-night talk shows and other clients, thought it would be amusing to track mentions of the phrase during last season’s Super Bowl, held in Houston. So he had employee Eric Cohn set up automated alerts for any references to “Houston, we have a ...” and another irksome space phrase, “The Eagle has landed.”

“And our cup runneth over with media mentions,” says Mr. Cohn, who curates the @UghHouston Twitter account. Most tend to be sports related, he adds, and some are uninspired variations on the original, such as when ESPN tweeted “Houston, you have a pennant,” after the Astros made it to the series. ESPN declined to comment.

Erik Boland, who writes about the Yankees for Newsday, admits “it wasn’t a particularly original thought” when he tweeted, “Houston, you’ve got a problem” after the Yankees knocked out the Astros’ starting pitcher in game 5 of the ALCS. The backlash didn’t take long.

“Wow, I haven’t seen this 178 times today. You’re goooood,” an Astros fan in New Hampshire replied. Jennifer Alderman, a 30-year-old Houston native living in Chicago, rolled her eyes and responded, “Delete your account.”

Her suggestion for anyone contemplating the phrase: “Just stop. Please, stop.”

These now-ubiquitous words are a slight variation of the famously understated reaction first radioed in by Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert during a mission to the moon in 1970 that had to be aborted. He was referring to an explosion that crippled the spacecraft and destroyed some of the crew’s oxygen supplies.

The actual quote: “OK, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

“Apollo 13,” a 1995 movie starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, dramatized the astronauts’ harrowing struggle to safely return to Earth after the accident—and helped popularize the misquote.

“It just sounded like it came off the tongue more easily,” recalls William Broyles, a Houston native and Astros fan who co-wrote the screenplay for “Apollo 13.” “We had no idea it would become such a trope for everything.”

One group that doesn’t mind the cliché: NASA.

“We think of it as one of our finest hours here, so much so that we just recently named our new Johnson Space Center podcast, ‘Houston We Have a Podcast,’” says Kelly O. Humphries, news chief at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Alas for critics, “Houston, we have a problem” shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, it’s going international.

When Tropical Storm Harvey descended on Houston in August, locals worried, not just about the flooding, but the coming deluge of “Houston, we have a problem” references.

Sure enough, there was a torrent. The New York Daily News blared on its cover, “HOUSTON, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.” A Mexican news outlet tweeted, “Houston tenemos problemas!!”

The New York Daily News didn’t respond to a request for comment.

That got a rise from people well beyond Texas, including Taylor Trask, 36, who runs a digital agency in Denver. A South Dakota native, Mr. Trask said he empathized with Texans who felt the national media didn’t work hard enough to understand them.

“Do we have to resort to ‘Houston, we have a problem’ during an actual hurricane, when lives are turned upside down? It was easy to see how little people were trying,” he says.

C. Nikole Saulsberry, 30, a marketing rep for a software company who grew up near Johnson Space Center, says she is irritated by “Houston, we have a problem” in part because it blandly references what was a serious crisis aboard Apollo 13.

While she was annoyed by its emergence after the Astros’ ALCS win, and is bracing for more during the World Series, she is planning to fire back gently, with a familiar Southern put-down.

“I might go on Twitter and scold people through the games and just say, ‘Bless your heart,’” she says. “If you’re Texan, you understand what I’m saying.”

—Jim Oberman contributed to this article.