The Mendoza Line: Higher Than We Might Think

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but would you want to be famous for being bad at something?

Maybe we should ask Mario Mendoza.

Setting the Standard

For those of you who did not grow up playing, watching, studying (and living and breathing) baseball as I did, Mario Mendoza was, to use a phrase from baseball parlance, a “light-hitting shortstop” who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Seattle Mariners, and Texas Rangers back in the 1970s and ’80s. He was, in fact, the gold standard—or rather the tin standard—for what constitutes “light-hitting.”

In his rookie season, 1974, his batting average was .221. That’s about 80 points below the standard of being really good (.300) and more than 30 points below the league average. Over the next eight seasons—the rest of his career—his average hovered around .200, sometimes above and sometimes below this threshold. He ended his career with an overall batting average of .215, meaning that he managed to hit safely—that is, roughly, reach base by hitting the ball in fair territory—about 21 times for every 100 at-bats. For the sake of comparison, I should point out that Rod Carew, one of the best hitters of this era, ended his career with a batting average of .328, more than 100 points higher than Mendoza’s mark.

Mendoza was not unique. Indeed, several players ended their seasons with even lower batting averages. Mark Belanger, who spent 18 years in the majors, typically hit in the low .200s and ended his career with an average only a few points higher than Mendoza’s lifetime average.

Unlike Belanger or any of these other players, however, Mendoza gave his name to a term that became famous in baseball circles. Well, he didn’t actually give it. Here’s how he described its origin:

Tom Paciorek and Bruce Bochte [Mendoza’s teammates on the Seattle Mariners in 1979] used it to make fun of me. Then they were giving George Brett a hard time because he had a slow start that year, so they told him, 'Hey, man, you're going to sink down below the Mendoza Line if you're not careful.' And then Brett mentioned it to Chris Berman from ESPN, and eventually it spread and became a part of the game.

Today, nearly 50 years later, baseball insiders still refer to a batting average of .200 as the “Mendoza Line.”

The Also-rans Can Really Run

This column is not intended to serve as a defense of Mario Mendoza or even a criticism of Tom Paciorek, Bruce Bochte, or George Brett. Guys will tease each other—heaven knows my high school buddies and I did (and still do)—and there are no hard feelings.

There’s something deeper here, I think.

When I was a kid watching baseball, reading books such as Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts, and poring over box scores in the newspaper (anybody else remember those?), I could be pretty judgmental. I paid a lot of attention to the superstars—especially Robin Yount and his teammates on my beloved Milwaukee Brewers—and they became the yardstick by which I measured everyone else. I could be pretty dismissive of the also-rans: “Geez, this guy is hitting only .247.”

Somewhere along the way, I had an epiphany. That guy, hitting .247 or, like Mendoza, .215, is better at hitting a baseball than just about anyone else in the world—including me. (For the record, I hit over .300 in my own leagues, but I was not facing Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton.)

Back in 1979, about 900 baseball players made it to the major leagues—out of approximately 2.86 billion adults in the world. Those players amount to .000035 percent of the world population. To be able to hit a baseball well enough to play in the major leagues, Mendoza was even better than one in a million; he was one in 2.85 million.

A Name That Will Live in Infamy

I forgive my younger self. I was just a teenager after all. Plenty of adults, however, proudly sit in judgment of athletes (and other celebrities) who are infinitely better than they are at their crafts.

Take another player, one who endured far more scorn—even downright hatred—than Mendoza ever did.

In 1986, the Boston Red Sox were chasing their first World Series championship in nearly 70 years. Up three games to one over the Mets, the Sox took a 5-3 lead into the bottom of the tenth inning and retired the first two batters. They were one out away from winning the World Series for the first time since 1918. The Mets scored two runs, however, and tied the score.

Mets batter Mookie Wilson was one strike away from making the final out and sending the game into the 11th inning. Then came one of the most infamous moments in World Series history, even all of baseball history. After several foul balls, Wilson hit an “easy” grounder in the direction of first base. Sox fans, I’m sure, expected it to lead to the third out of the inning. Then they saw the unbelievable: the ball went right past the Sox first baseman, between his legs, in fact. The runner on second base came all the way home, and the Mets won the game and went on to win the World Series in Game 7.

The name of that first baseman is Bill Buckner, a name that, I’m sorry to say, went down in infamy. This poor guy became the pariah of Boston. He even got death threats. (Listen, it’s just a game. Even I know that. Still, some people treat sports as if they are as weighty as family and religion.)

Here’s the thing, Sox fans (and everyone else sitting in judgment of professional athletes): most of you would have missed that grounder, too. Even if you could play a little ball in your day, you weren’t looking at a ball skidding at you with the World Series on the line and millions of people expecting—demanding—you to succeed. No offense, but I’m also pretty sure you could not have won a major-league batting title, as Buckner had done a few years earlier with the Cubs.

Buckner and Mendoza were exceptional athletes, some of the best at what they do, and they just made mistakes. Have you ever made any of those? I know I have, and I’m glad there weren’t millions of people watching me make them – in the moment and for years afterwards on endless replays.

Forgiving Failure

Part of my work as an educator has involved studying cognitive biases, which often make it hard for us humans to know what’s really going on around—and inside—us. For example, you may be familiar with confirmation bias, which makes us lean toward information that confirms what we already believe. A lesser-known trick that our minds play on us is called fundamental attribution error. Because of this natural bias in our brains, we tend to attribute the mistakes that other people make to their own deficiencies, but – surprise! – we blame our own mistakes on external factors. “The sun was in my eyes!“

The reality, of course, is that quite often the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, as Cassius put it in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

All that baseball players and the rest of us can do is to do our best and forgive ourselves – and one another – when we fall short, as we inevitably will.

Failure, in fact, has achieved new luster in the last few years (alas, too late for poor Charlie Brown). It’s not exactly the new success, as 60 is the new 20. (OK, I made that one up. We old guys can dream anyway, right?) Failure, however, has achieved its rightful place in the human experience—as something that, though unwelcome, is not only inevitable, but potentially helpful if we know how to use it.

In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck showed that successful people often have what she called a “growth mindset”; that is, rather than seeing failure as something devastating, a disaster to be avoided at all costs, they accept it as a kind of teacher, something they can use to succeed in the future.

This mindset is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, however. We still need to work hard, as Mendoza and Buckner surely did to get all the way to the major leagues, but we can move beyond failure.

We also can let others move beyond failure, and we ourselves can get past their failures and appreciate them for what they do well.

That’s a new kind of Mendoza Line—a high bar worthy of our aspirations.