Another Major League Baseball championship season (aka regular season) has come to an end. Yes, I agree that it’s strange that MLB refers to its regular season as the “championship season” but assessment and measurement specialists criticizing what other people decide to call things has kind of a glass houses and throwing stones feel to it, so let’s move on.
The MLB championship season comprises 162 games, by far the most of any of the major professional sports league in the United States, even soccer. Since early spring, those games have played out night after night, sometimes day after night, serving as the background music to our daily life, every now and then breaking through and making us sit up and take notice for a few moments in the same way that hearing a certain song or seeing a puppy video might do, but never striving to be the type of event that you plan your entire day around like some of the needier sports, constantly craving attention. That’s one of the things that I love about the sport.
So why then in the last week did baseball suddenly move from the background to the front of my mind?
Why have I spent the last week religiously searching the box scores first thing every morning to see whether the Oakland Athletics had won. And why on Saturday night did I fire up MLB TV (obtained free earlier this season from T-Mobile Tuesdays) to watch the final innings of game 161 between Oakland and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim – two teams long ago eliminated from playoff contention and rounding out the bottom of the AL West division.
Why have I been devoting such energy to the fortunes of the worst team in baseball?
The answer is simple. As the final week of the championship season unfolded, with only two series and six games remaining, said Athletics had only 48 wins. IFYKYK
But for those of you who don’t know…
There’s No Crying In Baseball
One of the other things that I love most about baseball is that it is a game of numbers; in particular, three types of numbers have always captured my attention.
The first type are statistics – day-to-day statistics. Some of my fondest childhood memories involved learning how to calculate earned run average and batting average (seriously). Determining how many hits a batter would have to have in their next 10, 20, or 100 at bats to raise their average 15 points. How many scoreless innings a pitcher would have to throw to lower their ERA by a run. Projecting a batter’s home runs, hits, walks, or RBI for the season (or is it RBIs or were you one of those pretentious radicals who said RsBi).
But advanced statistics and analytics have taken most of the fun out of that and damn near ruined the game. Kind of like school accountability indices.
The second type of numbers are the records that are the thread that connects the present to the past, the superstars of today to the heroes of our youth and the yesteryears of our parents and grandparent. No sport focuses more on those records and link to the past than baseball. Think NAGB’s obsession over the NAEP trend line as a comp.
But much like the NAEP trend line, the SAT 200-800 scale, and recent attempts at equating alternate test forms, the link to the past that we lean on is nothing more than a comforting illusion. The comparisons over time make for good conversation, but too much has changed over the years in terms of the players, the equipment, the ballparks, the conditions and conditioning, the drugs of choice, and the rules of the game to really allow for valid comparisons.
That leaves the third category, the numbers contained in the homespun wisdom of baseball greats, real and fictitious.
There is the observation of Ted Williams, the greatest hitter of all time, and the last man to hit .400 way back in 1941.
“Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.”
Or this gem by the character Crash Davis in the movie Bull Durham.
Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It’s 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There’s 6 months in a season, that’s about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week – just one – a gorp… you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes… you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week… and you’re in Yankee Stadium.
And this category wouldn’t be complete without an entry from the inimitable Yogi Berra – although many in school accountability have tried to imitate him.
Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical.
These are statements that sound profound the first time you hear them (for the most part), which on closer inspection and introspection don’t quite hold up the way you thought they did, but we go ahead and create narratives around them anyway. (Sound familiar. See note above about glass houses and throwing stones.)
Of all of the bits of wisdom that fit into this category my favorite has always been this one.
In a 162-game season, every team wins 50 games, every team loses 50 games, it’s the other 62 games that matter.
There are variations on this “50-50” rule. Some people set the bar at win 60 and lose 60. Legendary baseball manager Tommy Lasorda cut the pie into equal slices at 54 games:
“No matter how good you are, you’re going to lose one-third of your games. No matter how bad you are you’re going to win one-third of your games. It’s the other third that makes the difference.”
Personally, I prefer the 50 games option. It’s a nice round number and data bears it out. Since 2000 (not counting the pandemic-shortened 2020 season), there have only been 4 departures from the rule: teams have only failed to win 50 games 3 times and only the 2001 Seattle Mariners managed to lose fewer than 50 games. The 60-game rule, in contrast, was violated 36 times (18/18) over that same time period, including by the 58-loss Atlanta Braves this year.
Not content to rely on a single sample (because we should never be), I also looked back at the first 20 seasons I was a baseball fan, beginning in 1967 (not counting the strike-shortened 1981 season). The 50-game rule was not violated at all, while teams failed to win or lose 60 games 27 times.
So, this past week, I was on pins and needles as Oakland became the last team to reach 50 wins on the 161stgame of the year, losing their final game by the way to finish the season with a neat record of 50-112.
Baseball is Life
Of course, because baseball is life, and my life is assessment and education, I have found ways to relate the 50-game rule to what we do.
The most obvious connection is in the design of state tests. There are going to be items that pretty much everybody answers correctly and items that very few students answer correctly. None of those items really help you distinguish between students who are proficient and those who are not, it’s the other items that do that work.
It would be nice if the items that students answered correctly and incorrectly formed a perfect Guttman Scale, but students, like baseball teams, don’t behave exactly as expected. A bad team might beat a good team on a given day because of the pitching matchup, the weather, a great catch or a bad bounce, Ángel Hernández calling balls and strikes, or the baseball gods.
Back to tests and test results.
What are we hyper-focused on individual state performance when NAEP results that tell us that fewer than 50% of kids are Proficient or above and at least 20% of students are Below Basic in almost every single state – that’s a lot of students.
Or in looking at scaled scores on NAEP or school scores on state tests. The difference between the top scorers and the lowest scorers is not as wide as you might think it is and there are usually a whole lot of schools in the middle separated by 10 points on a scale that is theoretically hundreds of points.
And speaking of schools, do you think that it’s a mere coincidence that the number of days that a student who meets the 10% definition of chronically absent attends school 162 days in a school year (180 – 18), exactly the same number of games as in baseball’s championship season?
(Of course, it’s a meaningless coincidence, a numerical fluke that I just happened upon, but work with me here!)
We learn a lot about what a student can do (and what they cannot do) over the course of 162 days. Much more than we can ever learn about a student from a single test or from a batter in a single game.
Of course, we don’t need all 162 days to reach conclusions about the performance of students at the extremes, any more than we needed 162 games to reach conclusions about the Athletics who lost all of the “other 62 games” this year or the Atlanta Braves who won nearly all 62 of those games. We never need as much information to determine the proficiency of students at the extremes. We do need other types of information for those students.
But for many of the kids in the middle, there are going to be things that pretty much all of them can do, things that some can do better than others, and things that very few of them can do well.
It’s going to take all of the information gathered over the course of 162 days to form a good narrative about what they can do very well, what they can fairly well, or areas in which they need more practice and/or instruction.
We can crown a champion with a World Series or an on-demand, end-of-year state test, but it’s the record accumulated, the information gathered, over 162 games and days (particularly those other 62) that tells what we really need to know.
Image by bambang adi waluyo from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 