In the 1970s there was a half-hearted attempt to convert the United States to the metric system for measurements. The Metric Conversion Act, which Gerald Ford signed in 1975, encouraged but did not require a conversion from English to metric for trade and commerce. Since it was voluntary it never happened, because well, America.
For a few years there were attempts at showing the metric equivalents to English measurements. Signs like this were common on the roadways:
That was fine – a reasonable attempt to get people familiar with metric distances.
But the way baseball stadiums did this always bothered me. Historically, ballparks list the distance from home plate to the outfield wall, in a few locations (down each of the foul lines, in the ‘power alleys’, and in straight-away center field). In the 70s, some parks started adding distances in meters as well as feet:
See the problem? They presented the metric distance with two decimals of precision. I presume the goal was to be accurate. But all it did was make the metric system seem foreign and intimidating. It was a constant reminder that when it comes to this new system, math was always going to be involved. Not just rough math, but math to two decimal places!
And that level of precision was totally inappropriate. Do you think the original measurements from home plate to the outfield wall were accurate to a hundredth of a meter? That’s less than half an inch – I’m pretty sure the field measurements weren’t that precise. The groundskeepers rounded the distances to the nearest foot, so why not round to the nearest meter – 114 meters, or 123 meters, without the decimals. It would have made the point that a meter is about three times longer than a foot, without people having to break out their new $100 pocket calculators.
And the funny thing is, they didn’t even do the math correctly at Riverfront stadium (the photo on the right). 404 feet is 123.1392 meters. So they should have rounded it up to 123.14, not down 123.13.
The conversion to metric would have failed no matter how baseball stadia displayed the distances. But their choices certainly didn’t demystify the process.
