You may have been glued to the World Series last week, as the Chicago Cubs ended a 108-year drought and beat the Cleveland Indians in the 10th inning of Game 7.
Then you heard one of those wildly confusing statistics and came completely unglued.
The one that set me off involved Chicago’s David Ross, a 39-year-old catcher heading into retirement. He looks like half the dads I see at my kids’ sporting events, balding with a graying beard. He also happens to share a name with the priest at Lima’s St. Rose and St. John Catholic churches.
But I digress, as do some of the statistics they mentioned on the FOX broadcast of the game. At 39, Ross became the oldest player in Major League history to hit a home run in a World Series game.
Let’s unpack that gem for a moment. In the 114 World Series played, only 39 of them (34 percent) of them played a seventh game. Then imagine how few of those included home runs. Then imagine how many of those were by guys in the dwindling moments of their career.
Someone sifted through all that. We can thank the Elias Sports Bureau, the official statistician of Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, National Football League, National Hockey League and Women’s National Basketball Association. They’re the ones who feed so much information to ESPN, NBC, Turner, CBS and so many others.
On its Elias Says page on ESPN.com, it noted Ross could be just the second major-league player to hit a home run in the final game of a World Series and never play another game, behind Bobby Kielty of the 2007 World Series champion Red Sox.
Elias also noted it was just the fifth extra-inning winner-take-all game in World Series histories, with the home team winning the other four. (Cleveland was on the losing side of the last one, in 1997 versus the Marlins.)
I just wonder how we’d deal with this type of detailed factoid in our regular lives:
•Number of consecutive Wednesdays we ate fast-food for dinner as we ran children to various practices and events on their busiest day of the week. (Three, and counting.)
•Number of games Cleveland Browns fans watch before they start talking about next year. (One)
•Record for different sets of sheets on our bed in one day, pulled off because a baby decided to urinate in that split second there wasn’t a diaper. (Three, set Oct. 26)
•Number of days we couldn’t park in our driveway because the road construction project took a little longer than the predicted week it’d keep us blocked. (45)
•Consecutive fill-ups of the gas tanks on both my car and my wife’s car when the temperature dips below 40. (23, and counting, in what I predict will one day break Cal Ripken Jr.’s consecutive games streak)
•Number of times a child swears to not having homework on a night before finally admitting to needing to study for a test, usually 10 minutes before bedtime. (13)
•The number of times a toddler says “one more thing” like he’s Columbo when you’re trying to put him to sleep. (Six)
•How many of these jokes I can crack before they start getting old. (Three)
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