Baseball's law of averages hard to figure

Something was annoying last week as I lounged in the South of France - sometimes known as the North of Arlington Heights.

It was even more annoying than watching the White Sox and Cubs continue to flounder against mediocre pitching.

What could be worse than seeing that these teams couldn't even score on the SATs if the class valedictorian took the test for them?

How about hearing one of the reasons the Cubs and Sox gave for optimism is that good hitters will reach their career levels over the course of the season?

Presumably that means Milton Bradley is hitting .200, but he's at .280 over his career so he'll hit .300 the rest of the season, or at least in the games when he isn't on crutches.

The same math would apply to the likes of Derrek Lee, Jim Thome, Alfonso Soriano and even major-league sophomores Alexei Ramirez and Geovany Soto.

Baseball mythology forever has insisted that a player will level out at what he did in the past.

Never mind that that's like expecting a team that averages 4.8 runs per game to score 4.8 runs in today's game.

You hear the averaging argument so often that it becomes fact, like that Elvis is dead and professional wrestling is fixed.

Now, we know that Elvis is alive and wrestling is real but we still cling to the notion that a .280 hitter will hit .280.

When you think about it, how silly is that? A career .280 hitter doesn't hit .280 every year. He just averages out to .280 over a period of years.

We don't want to offend Cubs fans by dwelling on Bradley, so let's look at Thome: He came into this season as a career .279 hitter. However, that included last year's .245.

Guys get older, or they simply have bad seasons, or they are bothered by injuries some years, or they go through divorces, or they are in the last season of a contract, or they are in the first season of a contract, or they dabble in performance enhancers this year and not that year.

It's rare when somebody - a ballplayer, sports writer, car salesman, accountant, or anybody else - feels the same physically, mentally and emotionally for two consecutive years.

And even if he or she does, the results might not be the same due to other circumstances out of his or her control.

So to say a hitter will reach his career level is like saying every movie Will Ferrell makes is going to be equally funny (we sure learned the hard way that isn't true, haven't we?)

Anyway, Hank Aaron was one of the most consistent home-run hitters ever, but in his prime he hit only 24 one year, 32 the next and 44 the next.

Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader, had a three-year stretch in his prime of 205 hits, 176 and 210, and later 230, 185 and 210.

I guess what I'm saying is that players don't land on their career averages every year of their careers.

So maybe the Cubs and Sox should try something else, like getting Aramis Ramirez and Carlos Quentin healthy sooner than later or trading for reinforcements.

Otherwise their franchise scoring averages likely will decrease along with their 2009 victory totals.

mimrem@dailyherald.com