Games over .500

Not to worry. Mizzou won't ever have to worry about being over .500 in the SEC. You can leave that math to others.

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As I have gotten older and forgotten the little I ever knew about math I would say that you are well over 50% correct and approaching absolute certainty.

Yes Mizzoubaseball, you really Showed Me. That team in your example is 5 games over .500, not 10 games.

And, like you, I find the XX Games odd...I guess that is just a standard deviation?



And Tx...that was a heap o' fodder you laid out there.

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I find it pretty easy. In the example given, 30 games have been played. The results are known. For this team to get to .500, they have to lose the next 10 games. The results are what they are. It is merely a relational point in time, given actual results. Why do you want to bring "theoretical" math into a baseball discussion.

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That's a good answer baseball17. And I would think the reason Mizzoubaseball asked the question was to get an answer like yours.

In the example perhaps it would be best to state the team is "10 losses from .500" rather than "10 games over .500".



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And just going by memory, without doing any additional research, I'm relatively sure it was a phrase coined by newspaper baseball writers in the early 1900s trying to make it easier for readers to place a relative performance factor on a team's performance relative to a "win one, lose one" standard. Also during this time, baseball players were not generally well regarded, lots of hooligans and ruffians in the game. Sportswriters weren't held in a whole lot better regard.

10 games above is a positive view of the team performance. It connotes performance exceeding "average", the baseline for determining .500 is losses, not games played.

And, as a further footnote to newspapers, the World Series was so named because the first ones were sponsored the New York World newspaper, owned and published by Joseph Pulitzer, not because it was to denote the World Champions, as it has become to be known.

quote:

Originally posted by Mizzoubaseball:

As I got older and got to know more about math, I always thought the phrase "XX games over .500" was odd.

As I get older, I am starting to realize I know less about math...

And where was Train A going after it left the station heading east at 20 MPH?????

Wait, how can you be over 500 when there's only 162 games in a season?

How can you be hitting a thousand when you go 4 - 4 at the plate and you're actually still 999 from one thousand?

Pie are square.

quote:

Originally posted by Mizzoubaseball:
Just wanting to start a topic here I touched on in a different forum.

As I got older and got to know more about math, I always thought the phrase "XX games over .500" was odd.

If a team has played 30 games, and has a record of 20-10, how many games are they over .500? Now I know everyone says they are 10 games over .500. But since a .500 record in this example is 15-15, arent they really 5 games over .500?

Now, I would still say that this team in 10 games over .500, and go with it, since sports have always used this as a barometer as where the team stands. But it has been one of those odd phrases to me.

Its in how one looks at it. a .500 record only means that the wins and losses are equal regardless of how many total games have been played. If a team is one game under .500 it only means that they have one less win as compared with their losses total. In your for instance of 30 games where a .500 record is a record of 15-15 you are not counting the "15" if one actually has 20 wins as that would be incorrect math to say a team is only 5 games over .500.

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Grab a plate and get your bib papi!





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