Racing to the Top (One Sixty-Two: Day 36)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Thirty-Six: Franklin Gutierrez, Seattle Mariners

New Jersey, like so many states across America, is seriously considering major education reform. The federal “Race to the Top” grant program, championed by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has dangled $4.3 billion in educational funding in front of cash-starved states with one critical caveat: In order to win a piece of the federal funding, states must institute major educational reforms.

Merit pay. Charter schools. Data-based performance assessments. Challenges to tenure systems.

Movement toward educational reform is coming from both Democrats and Republicans, and teachers’ unions find themselves wondering just how much they can hold the line on some of these issues. For the first time in years, many individuals are stepping back from their traditional lines in the sand and taking a good, hard look at the ideas that educational reformers have presented. Is it worth changing the way we do things in order to “Race to the Top”? Can public schools really operate better than they do now? It’s a question many are asking.

Changes can be uncomfortable and strange sometimes, but there are moments when you realize they’re coming whether you like it or not. Many teachers across America are deciding to get involved in these conversations about reform, rather than ducking for cover. Over in the world of baseball, similar changes have altered the way teams look at run production.

For years, the prevailing thought around baseball was that you built a quality team through offense. But now that our technological revolution has given us a way to crunch numbers on the defensive side of the game, teams have had a collective epiphany: They’ve realized that some players save so many runs through their play in the field that they need only be adequate offensively in order to contribute mightily to the team’s success.

So a team like the Seattle Mariners trades for centerfielder Franklin Gutierrez, locks him up on a long-term deal, and lets him roam the outfield freely. Gutierrez catches balls all over the place, with tremendous range, and the baseball world of 2010 values this man far more than it had during the steroid era. Throw in Gutierrez’s 18 home runs, 70 runs batted in and 16 steals in 2009, and you’ve got a poster boy for baseball reform.

So merit pay has come Franklin Gutierrez’s way. His salary improved by more than 400 percent from last year to this year. The data supported it, so the Mariners gave it to him. It’s a new era, Franklin, and the reformers adore you.