Baseball & Numbers

 

Baseball is a game of numbers.  I’ve had the privilege to learn this through many years of my husband’s coaching and my boys playing.  I recently was introduced to a system that my husband uses called the Team Process Index (TPI).  The TPI is a way to take the focus off of the negatives of baseball and place it on the point system of the TPI.  There are three parts to the TPI where players and the team can earn points and when the teams scores 48+ points on this system they should bring home the big “W.”

Here is how it works and how being good with numbers matters in life once again. 

The three sections that points can be earned are Freebies, Base2, and QAB’s.  For example under the Freebies, if a team has 4 errors and their opponent has 3 errors the difference is -1.  Below I have attached a blank TPI, blank information sheet, and completed sheet.

  

 

What this does for a player is puts his focus on how he can score points for his team by having a great hard hit line drive and not on the fact that he just got out.  What it also does is incorporates math into their baseball lives.  They need to be able to add and subtract with positive and negative numbers.  This could be taught on a number line, which is easily added to the bottom of the form if needed.

The use of a number line in math, when adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers, gives students something tangible to look at.  For example looking at the errors on the sheet above, we had 2 and our opponent had 7, giving us +5 points.  Where if we would have had 7 and our opponent had 2, we would have had -5 points, which could be confusing for kids.

Again, math is so important to our everyday lives, that I hope by giving our students examples of how we use math outside the classroom they will realize its importance.

Please feel free to pass this on to any of the baseball coaches in your life and have a great time at the ballpark this summer vacation. ~ Shelly