Rooting around on the Internet about Twins' shortstop Jorge Polanco, who was suspended today by major league baseball for using a performance enhancing drug (Stanolozol), I came across passages like this one more than once:
Polanco, 24, settled in as Minnesota's full-time shortstop last season, hitting .256/.313/.410 with 30 doubles and 13 home runs in 133 games. He was especially good in the second half, hitting .293/.359/.511 with 10 home runs in 63 games after the All-Star break.
Though I'm enough of a fan to know what is signified by the abc/lmn/xyz notation, I was a little surprised to see it used repeatedly without any explanation--as if it can be safely assumed that anyone reading a baseball article will for sure know that these numbers refer, respectively, to batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. A useful explanation of the meaning of these three batting statistics is here. I think the back-story is that for a long time batting average was regarded as the preeminent measure of a batter's proficiency, which explains why figures like .367 and .406 will be immediately recognized by many fans as Ty Cobb's lifetime batting average and Ted Williams's batting average for the 1941 season, the last time any player hit for an average of more than .400. In our hip new century, however, it's generally acknowledged that batting average reveals less about a batter's value to his team than the other two measures. Indeed there is a fourth statistic, OPS, for "on-base plus slugging," that's pretty widely regarded as the best indicator of all. As the name suggests, OPS is simply the sum of on-base percentage and slugging percentage, so batting average is no part of it. Baseball geeks would probably vote to retire batting average from public discourse but for its outsized place in the history and lore of the game. If someone this season has a batting average of .397 on September 1, we are all going to be paying a lot of attention to his at-bats. Hardly anyone has any idea of what's a good, or great, or record-setting OPS.
Polanco's .293/.359/.511 over the second half of last season is pretty good for a 24-year-old shortstop and suggest that he could have been poised to establish himself as a real star player this season. The Twins have several guys like that, I think--besides Polanco, we have Miguel Sano, Eddie Rosario, Byron Buxton, and pitcher Jose Berrios. Now we're going to have to wait on Polanco.
When the topic is baseball and banned performance-enhancers, lots of fans think exclusively of superstar "cheaters" like Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark McGwire. But here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a list of players suspended for using banned performance-enhancers. I'm a pretty big fan and perhaps close to half the names are to me either barely familiar or outright unknown. Polanco, 24, from the Dominican Republic, earned $540,000 last year. If you can imagine how eager he is to stay in the big leagues, imagine another player, a little older and a link or two down the chain. In the movie Bull Durham, the Kevin Costner character (Crash Davis) has a memorable riff on the line between being stuck at the upper levels of the minor leagues and getting called up to "the show." You get 25 at-bats per week, Crash calculates. Seven hits, you stay put. Eight, and you're promoted to the show. One extra hit per week. The minimum major league salary is currently $507,500, whereas the minor league minimum is $2150 per month. It's easy to condemn "cheaters" but it should be just as easy to comprehend why these guys are desperate for anything that might give them an edge.
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