If you wanted yet another window into the worldview of the person who keeps writing these newsletters you get, you could do a lot worse than to check out a book from your local library. Any book would do, but a better idea would be to get Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, by Stephen Jay Gould. It is not a novelization of the hit show Full House. I do not think that the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould ever wrote a single episode of the show, but I could be wrong. Full House had more than 40 writers, not even counting those who only worked on one episode.

I digress. Full House (the book) tackled a number of misconceptions people have about statistics and large numbers, how we focus on outliers instead of common events, and how we misconstrue evolution as having an arrow of “progress” towards our own form, or intelligence, or “complexity” - ideas you’ve almost certainly seen, pushed by someone busy being wrong.

One way in which Gould tackled this problem was with a question that has puzzled sports fans since the 1950s: Why is the .400 batting average a thing of the past?

A quick aside for non-sports folks: A batting average is calculated by dividing the number of times a player hits the ball by their number of “at bats.”

Another quick aside: “At Bats” are not quite the the same as the number of times the player goes up to the plate, but for the purposes of generally talking about baseball with people who are not pedantic, you can express a batting average thusly: If a player has a batting average of .250 and you throw them one thousand pitches, they will hit 250 of them.

.250 is not a number chosen at random here. The average amongst all players in modern baseball hovers around .250. But the players who had seasonal .400s or who have careers that approach .400, they all earned those averages in a long gone era of significantly less professional professional baseball. Ted Williams, in 1941, was the last.

Yet in those days the average player was still hitting .250. Gould took a look at all this, and since he was a baseball aficionado, took a look at the various rule, gear, and strategic changes that have gone into baseball since 1941. He concluded that these changes were not the direct cause of the demise of .400 hitting. The demise was due to the simple fact that everyone got better.

When batters hit .400 it is an outlier, and outliers are more frequent when lots of highly variable events are in play. In the 1920s you very well might play a night game with no lights, or have a spitball thrown, or play games drunk, against a pitcher who smoked a pack a day. You might get off a train ride and play before sleeping. You might have a bunk while your teammate had a cot in an alleyway. Your team might have better equipment than your opponent. There were fewer players to substitute when an injury occurred.

There were more variables, more unique events. There were enough of these variables that for the league as a whole, the effect was invisible - the aggregate player hovered around the .250 mark. But for a few, those who were gifted and talented and on the right end of enough random action - .400 was a possibility.

Then, everyone got better. The game became more professional. Schedules were standardized. More players were scouted, brought in, trained equally. Professionalism allowed baseball to become the massively popular sport it once was, but it obliterated the random advantages that allowed .400 hitting.

What does this have to do with Star Trek, you might ask? Quite a bit. What I’m about to say can be generalized to most television, but just as Stephen Jay Gould took a look at baseball because he knew it, I will look at Star Trek, specifically network and syndicated Star Trek, Star Trek before the streaming era.

These shows offer some of the best episodes of television. There are great sci-fi stories in there. But there’s also a lot of crap. One of the most highly acclaimed TNG episodes, Measure of a Man, is in season two, bracketed by some of the worst Star Trek episodes you can watch.

City on the Edge of Forever, from the original series, won a Hugo. The episode before it, “The Alternative Factor” is considered to be one of the show’s worst. There’s endless examples of this sort of dichotomy.

The production of these shows were plagued by variable events. Gene Roddenberry, writers guild strikes, network interference, spec scripts by random writers, episodes written by interns, having to deal with Harlan Ellison, rewrites by Rick Berman. Yet the best episodes are still considered great to this day.

In baseball or the production of Star Trek, you can imagine each event as having a small benefit or detriment to the final product. Most of the time, things even out - the show bats .250. But on some rare day, luck is with you, and all the idiosyncratic things that happen are all plusses. The fingers all point up and push you to excellence.

It is too early yet to tell if the world of streaming TV and network consolidation will bring around something akin to the popularity of post 1920 baseball, but my money says that it will, that the coming era of TV has already seen massive improvements on the aggregate, while filling in the valley of abysmal shows with the peaks of the great ones.

This brings us to Dungeons and Dragons. D&D is big these days, thanks in large part to various podcasts and video series and a hard push by the publisher, Wizards of the Coast, to get their material out in front of people.

They did this by combining an easier-to-use 5th edition and being friendlier with the license agreements that allow people to use the game system to do a podcast, or get paid if they sell their own compatible material.

Key to this rise in popularity was Dan Harmon’s Harmonquest, the podcast and video series “Acquisitions Incorporated” by the old webcomic hands at Penny Arcade, and of course, the biggest of them all, “Critical Role” - a showcase of storytelling, dungeonmastering, and good players. There were a lot of other shows emulating the formula. I was even in one of them.

Critical Role and its ilk expanded the number of people who wanted to play the game. At the same time, the launch of D&D Beyond gave players and dungeonmasters the tools to become more professional and standardized. The popularity of the game gave rise to myriad sites providing sources for maps and materials via a quick google search.

When the pandemic hit, a lot of people began playing online, with tools like skype and discord. This brought a lot more talent onboard - people who were new to the game and needed resources and materials. They all got the same professional materials.

We will see if this current era, a transition from homebrewed quirky adaptations of a mass-market product to a more professionalized one, is like the transition of baseball from the Dead Ball to Live Ball eras. It will be complicated, because at the moment, Dungeons and Dragons owner Hasbro is attempting to murder all that goodwill by doing a scorched-earth licensing plan, forcing everyone to use a “D&D as a service” online product, and more.

You may be tempted at this point to think that I view this standardization and professionalization as a bad thing. The great 400 hitter is no more, they may never make another The Inner Light, my weird 1881 Steampunk Twin Peaks GURPS game will not be shared with another generation, all that.

You are missing out on the 1881 Texas Flavored Twin Peaks GURPS… for now.

But for the most part it’s not a bad thing. Just as the revival of baseball rules brought more people than ever to watch the game, or listen on the radio, or watch on TV, now more people can play Dungeons and Dragons. Or listen to a podcast. Or watch it on YouTube. They can also play other tabletop games, as I recommend.

They can do so secure in the knowledge that they can move on if their table is full of weird gatekeeping, or a dungeonmaster with a rape dungeon. They know there is less of a chance of a terrible game, and probably don’t think about the fact that they might be missing out on their local version of George RR Martin’s Wild Cards.

The same is true for streaming TV. You can tune in week to week without worrying about watching something awful, and the rising average show has certainly seen some outstanding content as well, though I’m always wary of the phrase “Golden Age of Television.” The new X Files and the classic episodes could be another subset to this article, if I could stand watching the new ones.

In fact, thanks to social media, relentless algorithms, and google, you can find a high level of professionalism in everything from cosplay to xenophobia. You get Matthews Mercer and Gaetz getting better at getting the word out, you optimize both Magic the Gathering and Marjorie Taylor Greene. So as we snip off the heads and tails of the distributions you get to ask yourself: do you want your dystopia built on incompetence, or skill?