Forgotten Treasures: Satchel Paige's Bobblehead

Extrapolation.

I had no idea what that word meant in 1990 when I first went to work for an insurance company, but I started hearing it a lot and had to figure it out pretty quickly. At the time, it was so I could project the proper premium or make a reasonable estimate of future claims based on past ones, things like that. It wasn’t fun in any way. In fact, it was just about as boring as you’d imagine. Still, it taught me a new skill that I’ve used a lot ever since.

When studying baseball statistics, particularly those from the Negro Leagues where the scorekeeping was pretty spotty, being able to extrapolate a player’s projected stats or value from incomplete records is a critical skill to have. When we do, we still don’t have anything remotely like an accurate record of a player’s performance, but it does give us a much better picture than we would have had without it.

I’m not a big fan of math, but it’s instructive, I think, to provide some of it for those who’ve never extrapolated baseball stats. I’ll use Lou Gehrig and the Negro Leagues player who was often called The Black Lou Gehrig when he played, Buck Leonard, as the examples. Looking at just their raw career totals, it seems pretty odd that they’d be compared.