Ninety Years of Doing It Wrong

During a quick perusal of the Sunday sports section -- yeah, I still take a gander at that old relic -- the team batting and pitching summaries leaped off the page and sucker-punched my eyeballs. Down at the bottom of the hitting stats were the Houston Astros, the very charlatans occupying first place in the AL West after winning a weekend series against the behemoths of Detroit.

There they were, the team known previously as the A-A-Astros, dwelling in the hitting cellar. Yet they are living large in the division penthouse. In fact, with a .228 batting average, Houston would seem to be batting in the sub-basement.

Of course, this compilation comes courtesy of the Associated Press, that venerable organization that voted Jimmy Foxx to last year's All Star team.

Thing is, the Astros have done something the Associated Press evidently has difficulty conceiving. They score runs by other means than compiling hits. Huh! Can they do that?

Houston has walked fifth most in the AL and leads the Majors in home runs. They are third in the league in runs scored. (As of the weekend.) That would be runs scored, the purpose of hitting.

So the Associated Press, and by extension newspapers across America, list the Astros as worst in their league at something when in fact they are third best. There is a word for this kind of journalism. That word is: Wrong.

The AP has been doing it wrong for 90 years, but since they've been doing it that way for 90 years they will continue doing it that way. When it comes to covering baseball, the Associated Press, which provides information to nearly every major news operation in America, has the credibility of Bernie Madoff's stock picks. That they are misinforming their readers seems not to make much difference to them. That informing readers is the very purpose of journalism seems to have equal impact.

This is a practice at the Associated Press. It's a policy. This is the way they list team batting statistics -- the way they've always done it.

Here's what should happen instead: Someone in a position of authority should take one look at this summary and determine, much as a third-rate spare-time blogger in Charleston, SC has done, that the formula is archaic, asinine and wrong. And he (or she) should deduce that wrong is bad and immediately declare that henceforth and without hesitation, it should be done right. This policy shift should come to pass without delay because doing it wrong is dumb and doing it right is smart. And smart is better than dumb.

Who could argue with that?

Well, I'm willing to bet it would generate much heat among the Neanderthals of baseball coverage and would take 17 months of review to alter a policy that pre-dates your grandfather. Meanwhile, when I look up the batting statistics in Baseball Reference the default is alphabetical, with Arizona first and Washington last. But clicking on any statistic will re-order the list in descending order of that stat, so if you want to determine the best hitting team, you just click on runs to see the Astros up near the top.

That's smart, which as you know, is better than the Associated Press.

And it didn't take Baseball Reference 90 years to figure it out.