The e-mail read as follows – “I was listening to the Braves-Reds game on the Brewton radio station yesterday (Wednesday of last week), and during the first inning one of the Atlanta announcers talked about how many runners Atlanta left in scoring position in their loss the night before. I’d never thought much about what runners in scoring position means. Does it mean that they had runners anywhere on base, on second or third or just on third?”
I thought this e-mail was interesting because it brought up something that I’d never thought much about before either, that is, the proper definition for “runners in scoring position.”
The best definition I found said that “a baserunner is said to be in scoring position when he is on second or third base. The distinction between being on first base and second or third base is that a runner on first can usually only score if the batter hits an extra base hit, while a runner on second or third can score on a single.”
Related to this is the term “runners left in scoring position,” which is what the Atlanta radio announcer was talking about the other night. This term “refers to the number of runners on second or third base at the end of an inning” and is a way to measure a team’s lack of offensive performance.
If you’ve got a sports-related question you’d like me to look into, e-mail it to me at courantsports@earthlink.net. I’ll look into it and run the answer in the following week’s paper.
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Another reader shot me a message last Thursday in response to my sports column last week.
The message read as follows – “Hey, Peacock. I read your bit about Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and it made me think about something I read the other day. Did you hear about the 16-year-old girl from the Netherlands who completed a solo sailing trip around the world in January? I find that hard to believe.”
While it is hard to believe, 16-year-old Laura Dekker, a native of the Netherlands, completed a solo sailing trip around the globe on Jan. 21.
According to news reports, Dekker departed Gibraltar on Aug. 21, 2010 and finished the trip on Jan. 21 when she arrived in Simpson Bay, Sint Maarten. She made the trip on a 38-foot two-masted ketch boat called “Guppy.”
Dekker not only became the youngest person to sail solo around the world, but she’s also cemented her name on the list of top female adventurers. She beat the previous solo record by 239 days, which was set by Australian Jessica Watson in 2010.
The youngest American sailor to have ever circumnavigated the globe is Zac Sunderland, who was 17 years, 229 days old when he completed the trip in July 2009. His trip lasted a total of 396 days.
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