Hit-Ball and the Best Player Present

A few months ago, a brilliant xkcd comic inspired a challenge within the science world: explain a complex scientific topic using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language. My first thought was, of course, “Why not try this with baseball?”. Using theUp-Goer Five Editor, I attempted to tell the story of last year’s AL MVP race. Here is the result (originally published on Beyond the Box Score):

Every year, people that write about hit-ball decide who they think was the best hit-ball player. Sometimes it’s easy to decide because there is one player that is better than every other player and everyone knows it. Last year was not one of those times. There was one player that was better than every other player, but many people were confused about this. Many people thought that a different player was better than every other player, even though he was not.

People thought that this player was better than every other player because he beat every other player in Three Numbers: times getting a hit for every time he had a chance to get a hit, times hitting the ball over the wall, and times getting another player to touch the last bag. For many years, these Three Numbers have been very important to people that watch hit-ball, so people really like when someone leads everyone in all three…

Read the rest on Beyond the Box Score…

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