Championships are built out of going 1 for 4.
We celebrate the big wins. But it’s the little wins that make them possible.
In the 21st century, we love advanced statistics. I’m a baseball fan — this article is going to be heavy on the baseball, God be praised and glorified for Spring Training, amen — and baseball has been for a very long time the Mecca of statistics and statistical analysis. This truth was made all the more obvious by Moneyball and its ilk, but some of us were working rotisserie lineups back when you had to buy huge almanacs and pore over tiny box scores in the newspaper.
Anyway, baseball fans have long been attached to the idea that a .250 hitter is meh, and a .300 hitter belongs in the Hall of Fame, without realizing something very interesting:
If you didn’t keep a detailed scorebook, you would never be able to tell the difference.
Really.
Let’s postulate a baseball season in which every day is game day. Let’s further say that you hit sixth, so that you’re going to get up four times a game, on average. You steadily get one hit every four at-bats, or a perfect .250 average — good enough to play every day, but no kind of all-star (absent other things like hitting homers, which we’re ignoring for now). You want to raise your average from .250 to…