Not that I didn’t already know NUMB3RS and baseball only produced insanity, but when watching seeing this week’s episode
that’s clearly wrong. To be fair, there’s actually a loud siren that goes off in the houses of any interested in baseball statistics when anyone says “well, obviously Jeter’s better”, but those numbers don’t make any sense. They don’t make any sense because they’re the 1996 stats, not the 1995, and they don’t make sense because if you combine two averages, the number has to be somewhere in between them. I don’t know teach advanced math at Cal Sci once every six or seven episodes to know that.
(Justice averaged .327 in those years, Jeter .302. Can’t figure out which two years they used to get that combined number)
And they don’t make sense because Charlie is dropping them easily. I can believe he knows every thing about any field of mathematics (or non-mathematics presented as math for the sake of having one professor who knows everything) but I can not believe he knows the batting averages of New York Yankees off the top of his head.
I bring this out not just to point out I can identify baseball mistakes on TV shows (I can!) but because it was one odd moment that took me out of a delightfully insane episode. The crazy conspiracies nuts, the JFK argument, the random arrest story – the plot was good, and all the little notes were great. They had me when Liz pre-empted Charlie’s “imagine” (and Charlie’s metaphor involved him being in a Parka for no particular reason) but they won me for good with the third camera. That was lots of fun.
imdb (which has a link to the full episode) says this episode was written by Robert David Port. I have no idea who that is, but I hope they continue being awesome.
(I don’t think I’ll have much to say about the result of the Veterans Comittee vote tommorow, but I might as well put off writing about the Cubs until then. Still working on twitter/wordpress integration.)