The Baseball Numbers Game
Rea,
I know you’re starting to learn about percentages at school. Today I want to tell you about a baseball team that used percentages to see something that every other team had missed for over 100 years. It’s a story about how looking at numbers differently can reveal hidden patterns that change everything.
Back in 2002, the Oakland Athletics (the A’s for short) had a big problem. While rich teams could spend over $125 million on players, the A’s only had about $40 million. Most people thought they didn’t stand a chance.
But the A’s looked at baseball differently. They noticed something that everyone else had missed. In baseball, teams win by scoring more runs than the other team. Most teams spent lots of money on players who could hit home runs because that was an exciting way to score. But the A’s wondered if there was a cheaper way to win.
Looking at the percentages, they found something interesting. Players could help the team score runs in two ways: either by hitting the ball really well (which was expensive) or by being really good at getting walks (which was much cheaper). A walk might not be as exciting as a home run, but it still helped the team score!
The A’s realized that players who were good at getting walks were just as valuable as the expensive home run hitters — but nobody else had noticed this. While other teams laughed at them for signing these “boring” players that nobody else wanted, the A’s had discovered a secret in the numbers.
Then something magical happened. The team that nobody believed in started winning. And they kept winning. They won 20 games in a row — something no team had done in 100 years of baseball! A team that spent $40 million was beating teams that spent $125 million, all because they looked at the numbers differently.
What happened next was even more amazing. Other teams started copying what the A’s had done. Now every team in baseball uses math to find hidden patterns in the numbers. The story was so incredible that they made it into a movie called “Moneyball”!
The A’s showed that sometimes the most valuable things are hiding in plain sight — you just need to look at the numbers in a new way to find them. That’s what percentages help you do: see patterns that others might miss.
Love, Abba
