Basic math skills.
I tore through Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
* These “percentages” are designed to drive anyone who thinks twice about them mad. It’s one thing to give 110 percent for the team, but it is another to get on base 1,000 percent of the time. On-base “percentage” is actually on-base “per thousand.” A batter who gets on base four out of ten times has an on-base “percentage” of four hundred (.400). Slugging “percentage” is even more mind-bending, as it is actually “per four thousand.” A perfect slugging percentage– achieved by hitting a home run every time– is four thousand: four bases for every plate appearance. But for practical purposes, on-base and slugging are assumed to be measured on identical scales. At any rate, the majority of big league players have on-base percentages between three hundred (.300) and four hundred (.400) and slugging percentages between three hundred and fifty (.350) and five hundred and fifty (.550).
-Lewis, 127
Yikes! Where to begin? I’ll skip his ridiculous usage of quotation marks and get straight to the point. 4/10 = .4 = .40 = .400 = 400/1000. Just because baseball stats are rounded after three decimal places and read as if the decimal point wasn’t even there by an announcer, does NOT equate per cent (literally per 100 from the Latin) with per thousand.
I don’t know how the editing process works in a publishing house like Norton, but for no one to catch the idiocy of this footnote makes me squirm a little inside. Basic math literacy (numeracy) is important for every one to learn no matter what they intend to do in life!
December 31st, 2006 at 12:09 pm
You have to admit, though, that if someone uninitiated to the way baseball stats are discussed were to tune in for the first time and hear that a player has an “on base percentage” of “four hundred,” that would seem to her ridiculous.
December 31st, 2006 at 8:17 pm
I’ll admit that it can be presented in a confusing manner to the uninitiated. But if she then went on to write a book about it? You strike me as one of the last people to tolerate innumeracy.
January 3rd, 2007 at 12:15 pm
pedantic as usual.
sophomoric as well.
January 3rd, 2007 at 1:02 pm
what do you mean pedantic? this book will be the first point of entry for many burgeoning stat heads. why encourage muddying the waters with misinformation right off the bat? there’ll be plenty of that to come, don’t you worry.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Pedantic and sophomoric because it a question as old as baseball, not new or peticularly learned therefore nobody needs to be taught anything here. I’ve heard people complain about this for years.; usually someone who is an academic who does not know baseball. My second-year chemistry professor was one who went on about this 20 years ago when I worked for him in 1985. He was from England.
The problem is not the reading of a decimal representation of the fraction. They could report the decimal and then just convert to % in their heads when saying it outloud. Not a difficult thing to do (for most) and not incorrect as they would be equivalent statements. Saying 62% or 0.62 or 62/100 are equivalent; one is the decimal form, etc. So the saying of the first three digits after the decimal point is the bigger problem if calling it a percentage. Therefore his problem is noted barely. I don’t think he gets it either, though and certainly less so than you.
Batting average should not pose a problem as it is usually called a batting average. So call everything an average, I guess. This would leave it ambiguous enough.
The original problem was with the winning percentage for the teams. The problem with a “real” percentage is, when rounded to two significant figures (or really just say rounded to two decimal places as these data do not have associated errors to retrict them as they are counted numbers and therefore considered absolute and do not have an experimental range), as usually done, it is not precise enough to distinguish teams from each other.
Three decimal places usually works just fine. This is true with the other “percentages” such as slugging and on-base for individual stats but sometimes need FOUR places to distinguish a heirachy.
Now, when using percentages “correctly” we will need to say things like, “The yankees went 100-62 playing sixty one point seven percent baseball.” Nobody is going to say the point whatever stuff. Therefore a little artistic licence is needed. There is not a generally accepted term for per thousand. Accounts say basis points for the thousand’s place in their terminology but that won’t wash here.
So what we need to do is come with a new term or accept the “error” and call it special baseball terminology and teach each other the secret handshake. This way we can all get along and worry about important things like why would anyone pick up The Bigunit and give him an extention?
May 6th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
I’m sorry to be five months late, but I couldn’t let you slander the poor man without saying anything. His math is just fine, if slightly confusingly presented — the point he’s making is about the English language, not about numbers, that point being that the official term used by the MLB doesn’t match the official numerical representation of the statistic. That’s because when people use the word “percent”, there is an implied use of “out of one hundred.” i.e.:
“My body is 40 percent water.” -> “My body is 40 per every 100 parts water.”
But there’s no way to say this sentence correctly using either way of saying the figure given as OBP:
“He has a four hundred On Base Percentage” -> “He gets on base four hundred times per hundred chances.”
or
“He has a point-four-hundred On Base Percentage” -> “He gets on base .4 times per hundred chances.”
Of course, each of these are incorrect in different ways, but his point is that it’s silly (and confusing) to represent anything labeled as a “percentage” using a decimal point — you could correctly say that a player who gets on base 4/10ths of the time has an “on base per-one-age of .4″, or an “on base per-thousand of four hundred”, or an “on-base percentage of 40″, but for some reason the guys who write the scorecards decided to use a term that makes no sense with the number provided.
November 10th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Good points Adam.