Hitters connect with average on the line

Over the past few decades, baseball statheads have examined America’s pastime in a revolutionary way. Sabermetrics, the study of game-play statistics, has turned a sport of pitchers and hitters into a field of complex numbers and equations.

A study soon to be published by Wharton professor Uri Simonsohn, who admitted that he has never “held a bat or watched a game,” just might be able to quantify the game’s human element.

Entitled “Round Numbers as Goals,” the study in Psychological Science looked at whether baseball players boost their performances with the chance to achieve a round number — in baseball, that magic number is a .300 batting average.

Surveying Major League Baseball players between 1975 and 2008 who were hitting .298 or .299 before their last at-bat of the season, the study found those players batted an astonishing .463.

Recently graduated Penn outfielder Tom Grandieri knows the situation all too well. Last season, Grandieri entered his final game needing two hits in his final five at-bats in order to finish over .400 for the year.

He went 1-for-5.

With his baseball career over, Grandieri now has to stare at the number .399 in his senior stat line.

“The first thing that came to mind was how many at-bats I had over the course of the year that if I just got one more hit,” Grandieri said.

According to Simonsohn, who conducted his study with University of Chicago professor Devin Pope, “round numbers are very salient numbers and hence will motivate behavior.

“Nobody wants to qualitatively describe their performance as ‘just short of X,’” he wrote in an e-mail.

Baseball players in particular are very goal-oriented, since statistics are such a major part of the game. That helps explain why Simonsohn and Pope found that not one of the 127 hitters who stepped to the plate with a .300 average on the line drew a walk.

“When you come back, there’s the banter in the locker room like ‘why did you sit back and look at strike three when you could’ve hit .300?’” Grandieri said.

The 2010 Ivy Player of the Year added that statistical milestones are a common topic of discussion among players, classifying a “great season” in the Ivy League as one with a .350 average, 10 home runs, 50 runs scored and 50 runs batted in — all round numbers.

In 2010, Grandieri’s teammate Dan Williams led the League in batting average at .403. Just one Ivy hitter ended the season with an average between .296-.299, while six fell between .300 and .304.

Grandieri, who finished his three-year Penn career at .360, employed an approach he learned from a summer-league teammate, splitting his season into ten-at-bat segments. If he went 2-for-10 in the first segment, he figured he needed a base hit in four of his next ten at-bats to maintain that magic .300 average.

“That’s the best way to go about it,” he said. “Ten is something very easy to grasp.”

Players use these psychological tools to play through the slumps and streaks that define a season.

“There’s definitely a human element [to the game],” Grandieri said. “Baseball players are as much people in the sporting world as [anyone].”

While the Media, Pa., native landed on the dreaded .99 during his final year of baseball, he was quick to point out that his final collegiate at-bat resulted in a double that broke Penn’s single-season record for doubles and hits.

“When there’s something attainable out there,” he said, “you’re gonna try everything you can to get it, especially when you’re down to one at-bat.”

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