For over 3,217 years, students have been asking parents and teachers when what they were “learning” in school would apply in real life.

I think by the time I hit my early 20’s I had figured out exactly what one learned in grade school would or wouldn’t matter in the real world. I’m sure you question the cashier that has difficulty making change even with the number flashing before them.

The one thing I mistakenly believed was a school only thing was the curve or sliding scale. Every class had that guy or gal that would ask the teacher/prof before every exam if the test would be graded on the curve. 93.7% of the time it wasn’t the best student.

Yesterday I was listening to a baseball show on the radio and the hip host only mentioned weighted OPS, 4000 times in 37 minutes. He’s not the only culprit to rely too heavily on league averages and weighted this and that. For the uninitiated, OPS is on base percentage + slugging and weighted refers to league average. It’s used to justify (explain really crappy numbers).

Because league wise numbers are so crappy, they use the sliding scale to make chicken salad out of chicken bleep. In my twisted world, a .480 slugging percentage is the floor for a slugger or rather, a good number for an alleged power hitter. .500+ was a legit slg.

While reading about the passing of Rico Carty (85 y/o) moments ago, I was slapped in the face with the stupid reliance on weighting numbers. I really didn’t expect a contemporary explanation or clarification for what Rico accomplished in 1970. As a member of the Braves, he won the NL batting crown with a .366 avg, ,454 obp, ,584 slg, and 21 homers and 105 RBI. Heck, that doesn’t need context. He completely kicked butt. Unfortunately, when he came to the Cubs in 1973, this 8-year-old fan was expecting that and not what we got.

If you happen to favor the sliding scale of weighting every statistic to hide how bad some of these standards are, you’ve probably forgotten Spinal Tap’s lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel’s explanation for why his amplifier “goes up to eleven,” then you don’t realize the absurdity of it all.

R.I.P Rico!