|
(Don't worry, this eventually gets to baseball... I promise.)
As a kid, my mom once made the mistake of incorrectly answering aloud a multiplication problem from her teacher. Apparently, the teacher had once answered the same question wrong, too, and was subsequently embarrassed into learning the answer. When my mother did the same thing, the teacher enacted the same punishment: the entire class got into a circle, with my mom at the center, and pointed their fingers at her as they sang "8 times 7 is 56! 8 times 7 is 56!" That went on long enough for an embarrassed little girl to learn her lesson. Needless to say, my mom never again forgot what 8 times 7 was.
Most of us have a similar experience in our childhood. I don't mean the crowd of kids pointing at you and laughing as they sing the answer - that's just cruel, and I certainly hope no one else has similar memories. What I mean is, most of us have some relatively minor lesson from our childhood educations that we remember better than others because of the way we learned it. Maybe it's a math concept that you struggled with for a week or more until an older brother or someone showed you a nifty little way to understand it and you had that "hallelujah moment". Or maybe it was a history lesson that you read over and over until you just couldn't forget it. Chances are, though, that it was a grammar lesson that some overly strict teacher drilled into your head. "You cannot start a sentence with 'because'!" or "Don't end a sentence with a preposition!" or "It's '20 items or fewer', not '20 items or less'!" and so on.
It's a common story: kids write as they talk, and often miss the nuances of the written word, leaving fragments and the like all over the place. Teachers then point out their mistakes, but, instead of trying to teach the full complexities of the English grammar to an eight-year old, they give the kid a shorthand rule to follow that is meant to help. The kid then internalizes that shorthand rule as "the rule" and spends the rest of his life correcting people who don't adhere to it. After all, that's the rule that he had such a hard time learning and, now that he's learned it so well, he's not going to forget it. And, lord forgive you if he sees you make that mistake on a website - there's no internet alive that will prevent him from trying to teach you that same lesson.
The problem is that this isn't "8 times 7". When it comes to language, there are few hard and fast rules that follow the "100% right or 100% wrong" nature of an arithmetic problem. Chances are, that shorthand rule that the kid originally learned was only true under certain circumstances and with certain qualifications, but he never learned those because the teacher thought it was too complicated for him at that age. But now it's 30 years later and that lesson has been ingrained in him for all those years. It's asking a lot - maybe too much - to expect him to accept that he's been wrong all these years and to change his ways. For a lot of people, there's just too much history there to fight.
Which is where baseball comes in. For many, many baseball fans, especially those who grew up in the 1950s/60s and before, the traditional stats - the RBI, the AVG, the W/L record - are the stats that they internalized at a young age, the stats that they've defined as "the rule" and that they've spent their life abiding by, but that only work in limited circumstances that they were too young to learn years ago. In language, the people that I've described are called "prescriptivists" - there's a certain prescription, or set of rules, that the English language must follow at all times. In the same vein, these traditionalists can also be thought of as "baseball prescriptivists". To them, there's a set of rules that must be followed when analyzing a club's or a player's performance. These are rules that they spent a lot of time learning and understanding when they were younger, and that they've spent a lot of years using and trusting. They've served the prescriptivists well, and any change seems unnecessary and ill-advised.
(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)
Go to any message board or blog devoted to grammar "mistakes" like the ones mentioned above, and you'll see hundreds of comments from people complaining about the same things. For some reason, people are passionate when it comes to these language pet peeves. This is exactly what we have to deal with as we try to get baseball fans, writers, and announcers to understand and appreciate the less traditional stats. It's why Adam Wainwright had the most first-place votes in the Cy Young voting last week, why there was such a firestorm over the Vazquez/Haren picks, and it's why Joe Mauer won't be a unanimous MVP this afternoon.
There is no easy way to solve this dilemma. In the language world, prescriptivists are challenged by "descriptivists" - people who try to study the language as it is spoken and "describe" it. I like the clear analog to statheads/sabermatricians. But even there, it's obvious that these two worlds are not going to merge anytime soon. With millions of adults passing on their life-lessons to the younger generations everyday, and with the likes of Strunk and White still printing millions of copies, there will seemingly always be a divide. It's no different in baseball. My recommendation, and my hope, is that the less-traditional stats will get embraced by more and more people in all age groups. If that happens, then we can only assume that kids will get exposed to those ideas at an earlier age and learn to accept them as "the rule" instead of batting average or runs batted in. Maybe that's pie in the sky.
In any event, I think we have a better chance of changing a generation's mind about baseball stats than we do about language "rules". If Joe Mauer doesn't win the MVP award this afternoon, for example, the debate will be long and detailed. But it would be minuscule in comparison to the firestorm that would erupt if, say, President Obama announced that he could pay for Social Security and a public health option for the next 200 years if only colleges would no longer use Elements of Styles in writing classes. And if he said it while splitting an infinitive and ending the sentence in a preposition... that might actually be fun to watch ;-)
(Wow, a thousand words on language and baseball... I feel like Joe Posnanski!)
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Bloguin is the revolutionary blog network specifically focused on helping bloggers get the most out of their websites. We're currently working on building a large network of online communities and hope to expand our blogging coverage to include a wide range of topics. 
The Bloguin Network allows advertisers to promote their products and services to our ever-growing number of visitors. We offer both site-specific ad placements as well as the ability to run a network-wide campaign. If you're interested in working with Bloguin to meet your advertising needs, please contact us.
The Bloguin Network is always looking to expand. We're specifically looking for blogs in the sports, entertainment, and video games field, but are open to adding any type of quality site. If you're a blogger and interested in joining our network, please fill out our application form.
The Bloguin Login gives you full access to everything our network has to offer. Your name and password will work for each and every one of our sites. Signing up is simple, and will allow you to post in all our forums, create member blogs, and access other cool features! What are you waiting for? Create an Account! 
I'm actually on opposite sides of both worlds you describe here (language and baseball). I think I'm something of a language prescriptivist, but that probably has more to do with the way my mind is wired than the way I learned it. I don't necessarily hold everyone else to the same standards, but I do my part to preserve the purity of our great English language.
When it comes to baseball, it's funny to think that my main resource used to be a baseball encyclopedia that didn't even list OBP. Now when I use Baseball-Reference.com my eyes naturally move to the OPS+ and ERA+ columns.
I guess the difference is that I see language as a system of communication that has its own protocol while I see baseball stats as data for interpretation of a player. More accurate data? I'm all for it! Improper grammar? You're butchering something beautiful!