I started a post about baseball stats, and you'll never believe what happened next!

This past week has brought with it plenty of late, late nights, thanks to our Kansas City Royals bringing more baseball joy than our city has seen in decades. After nearly 30 years of playoff desert, our beloved team has so far made it to the third round. The city has turned blue: banners on the plaza, seas of blue shirts at work and play, and even blue dyed water in our fountains.

Of course, it's impossible to think about baseball without thinking about math. Statistics abound in baseball perhaps more than in any other sport. Respected statisticians have devoted years of research to the numbers of baseball. There are batting averages, home runs, runs batted in, earned run averages, and hits allowed, just to name a few. With so much data and so much history, statisticians have come up with accurate, albeit complicated, formulas that not only quantify players' performance, but also predict future performance.

With such a powerful tool for measuring performance, it should be a simple matter to correlate compensation with performance, so one would expect players' salaries to reflect past and predicted performance. One would be wrong.

Without going into the complicated data, research has shown that baseball players' salaries are not necessarily directly tied to future or past performance, or even to their importance to a team's success. For complex reasons, determining players' salaries purely on stats just hasn't proven viable.

Which brings us to teachers. Specifically, teachers in Missouri. There is a proposed constitutional amendment on this November's ballot that would use student performance on standardized tests to determine salaries of teachers. It's like the idea of tying baseball players' salaries to performance. Except that there are the added variables by measuring student performance and making the leap in logic that this is a direct result of teacher performance, while ignoring other factors that affect student performance. Except that the data for student performance is not nearly as rich or deep as the data for player performance. Except that, unlike the research into stats and player performance, the current research on the link between student performance and teacher effectiveness is murky at best. Except that unlike baseball stats, which have a long history of accurately predicting future performance, student performance versus teacher effectiveness has only been measured a short time, and even the early data is suggesting that there is not a clear, direct relation. Furthermore, no one yet has successfully predicted the future effectiveness of teachers.

So, even though math can accurately assess and predict player performance, the powers that be have decided that best practice takes much more into account than stats alone. But ironically,  some want to correlate salaries directly to stats in a case where the math can not accurately assess performance.

Good reason and good math lead to a no vote on amendment 3.