by Most of the time when you watch baseball it feels like nothing is happening. That’s because it’s hard to hit a baseball travelling at 90 mph or more. You haven’t got a plank to hit it with like you do in cricket, and unlike in cricket, when you do hit the ball (unless you hit it into foul territory but let’s not complicate things here), you have to run 90 feet to first base without being tagged or caught, either of which means you’re out. And if you rack up three strikes, which usually occur as a result of not hitting the ball, you’re out too. In short, due to the shape of the bat and the structure of the game, baseball is stacked heavily against the batter. An average Major League batter will get on base safely only about 26% of the time (this headline statistic in baseball is written as a decimal, .260, and pronounced “two-sixty”). Anything over .300 means you’re pretty handy with a bat in your hand; above .320 and you’re a superstar. Of course for somebody to outperform the overall average, someone else needs to underperform, and someone who did consistently underperform went by the name of Mario Mendoza. The bespectacled Mendoza was an effective defensive player in the late seventies but not too great with the bat. For a few seasons his average hovered around the .200 mark, and when some wag said to another player in the midst of a form slump, “you’ll be sinking below the Mendoza Line if you’re not careful”, the name caught on. The Mendoza Line was (and still is) the threshold separating the mediocre batters from the truly awful. The other significance of the line is that once you drop below it you’re so bad at batting that the rest of your game can’t possibly make up for it. Mendoza finished his career with a .215 average but by that stage the name, meaning a .200 average, had stuck.
The term Mendoza Line is still used in the US, in baseball and in other contexts, such as politics and box-office takings. It can come into play even when there’s isn’t a number involved. When I recently read about the term I thought about my work history. In my insurance work, some of my colleagues weren’t all that nice, and failure to connect with them was in some ways understandable and acceptable. In my current job the people are much more pleasant, yet I still can’t build connections in a way that will help me progress there. If I can’t manage it in this job, I’ll probably never manage it in any team environment anywhere. I’ve now dipped below the line which I’ve spent so much time trying to stay above. It’s about time I put my bat away and played something else.
I should say that I do get on with my work colleagues, at least those in my immediate vicinity, just as I get on with most people. That’s a big part of how I’ve managed to get jobs and not get fired. But building a relationship is something rather different. (I’d say I did build a relationship with the woman I met in Auckland recently. Her and maybe my current carpool mate, and that’s it.)
Yesterday I saw a Pokémon figure in the shape of a pig on my colleague’s phone. I asked if it was a Porkemon. I also had my last performance review with the company. Maybe it was my last anywhere.
