Useless knowledge

The following is recap of the Wild Things' record and attendance figures at the all-star break each season, along with a hitting statistic that Washington first baseman Ernie Banks (pictured) leads the league in by a large margin.

This is the first time Washington has been as low as fifth place in the standings at the break and eight games out of first place is the most they've trailed the division leader. In 2006, they were in fourth place, 7 1/2 games out of first, and still made the playoffs.

The first-half attendance slipped for the second year in a row (though only by 165 per game, which in this economy isn't bad) and is at the franchise's all-time low. A game this year against Gateway drew a paid attendance of only 1,340 – the smallest in franchise history – and there couldn't have been more than 500 people in the park.

RECORD AT THE BREAK:
2002 - 23-16
2003 - 26-20
2004 - 30-17
2005 - 27-18
2006 - 21-22
2007 - 28-17
2008 - 26-24
2009 - 21-27

ATTENDANCE AT THE BREAK (PER GAME)
2002 - 2,942
2003 - 3,390
2004 - 3,242
2005 - 3,048
2006 - 3,133
2007 - 3,180
2008 - 2,899
2009 - 2,734

One of the sabremetric categories is Batting Average on Balls in Play. This is a measure of the number of batted balls that safely fall in for a hit. The sabremetrics people do not include home runs when calculating this, but for our purposes we will. If you take every Frontier League hitter with at least 100 at-bats and toss out their strikeouts, no player has a higher batting average than Ernie Banks, not even Rockford's Jason James, who has a 38-game hitting streak. In other words, when Banks makes contact, he's been hitting like, well, the other Ernie Banks.

The 5 highest batting averages of balls in play:

.526 - Ernie Banks, Washington
.480 - Joseph Scaperotta, Gateway
.473 - Jason James, Rockford
.446 - Charlie Lisk, Gateway
.436 - Frank Meade, Evansville