Riddle

Next week, I will be in New York City and will report on location from the former site of the Polo Grounds. In the mean time, here is a baseball riddle that I thought of. Send your answers to jonahharris27@gmail.com. The first person to answer it correctly will win, um, something good.

1. Rosaceae
2.
3. Wahoo
4. US Treasury Bill

Which one item of the below list does NOT fit in the blank space above?
A. Peach
B. John Boehner
C. Spoke
D. MQ-1C

Once you get it, it should be easy.

The Line

This is my first post in a few weeks. I hope I haven't lost too many readers.

Something occurred to me recently. I was looking through statistics on baseball-reference.com, and I found that I was not really impressed with .300 averages. What I mean is I would see someone hit, say, .306 and think to myself only, 'that's a very solid season.' But imagine how few players actually hit .300 throughout the entire season. Imagine how hard that is. And imagine how a .300 hitter looks like playing, It seems like you can't ever get him out.  A .288 hitting player will be a great guy to have, but looks mediocre on paper. I came to the conclusion that batting averages in general are too harsh. 

But wait. I remembered Aubrey Huff and Miguel Tejada, I have to think hard to remember any kind of hot streak from either one in 2011. They both hit abysmally. But if I look at their averages of .246 and .239 (respectively), they don't seem so terrible. Sure, not top-of-the-order numbers, but still serviceable on a major league level. Huff would only need to hit 27 more singles in 500 at-bats to reach .300. To me, it looks like players with low averages seem to hit even worse than their numbers imply. 

So I came to the conclusion that there was some line, wherever it might be, that serves as a cutoff. Above it, players are done a disservice by the batting average metric. Below, they are worse than their average implies. So where is this line? I'm not exactly sure. I know that Freddy Sanchez hit very well in his brief 2011 season, and ended with a .289 mark. I know Pablo Sandoval hit .268 in 2010, and seemed inept, but so did Andres Torres, who had a great year. Tim Lincecum has a career average of .121, but he doesn't seem like half the batter of a run-of-the-mill position player or a third of Ty Cobb. He seems like a tiny fraction of a normal hitter. I know Nate Schierholtz had a great year with a .278 average. It is hard to pinpoint exactly where the cutoff is. 

Many will say that the inconsistent image or whatever you want to call it is because of other factors- walks, home runs, power, and the like. This is possible, but I still believe that the line exists. Maybe the line is the league average. In the American League, which we use because pitcher's don't hit, the league average batting average in 2011 was .258. I would have thought it was higher but that is beside the point. It the line there? I'm not sure. It seems to be that the line, if it exists, should be higher. What do you think? Is there a line? If so, where is it?