Major League baseball players are judged according to their statistics. A player who gets a hit three out of every ten times he comes to bat, for a .300 batting average is a star, while a player who only gets a hit ever two out of ten times, for a .200 average, is a bum—unless he’s a catcher and hits a fair number of home runs, in which case, he starts for the Mariners.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if those of us who don’t make our livings by wearing pajamas in public were likewise assessed on numerical scale like this? Imagine the possibilities for self-understanding and interpersonal communication if we all had our performance in life made clearer with statistics that helped us to see more accurately who we are and to share that information with others.
So, for instance, politicians and other public figures might have a statistic for how often (or infrequently) they tell the truth. It’s unlikely any of them would score a perfect 1.000, but falling below the proverbial “Mendoza line” (.200) would mark them as someone not to be trusted—(not that this would prevent them from being elected to the highest office in the land.)
Good fielders in professional baseball routinely have a fielding percentage about .990; this would be a reasonable standard to shoot for when it came to one’s statistic for being kind to strangers. Nearly everyone occasionally makes an error, but anyone who isn’t close to perfect in this stat should probably be sent down so to speak.
The top sluggers in the game have an on-base plus slugging percentage of over 1. Seems like a stat which combined the percentage of times a person tips well plus the percentage of instances in which an apology is called for that they say they’re sorry should yield a number over 1.0 for the best of us, as well.
Gives a whole new meaning to asking for someone’s number.
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