Mendoza Line

All Music Guide:

Athens, GA, indie pop outfit the Mendoza Line were formed during the summer of 1995 by singer/guitarists Timothy Bracy and Peter Hoffman (longtime friends born and raised in McLean, VA) along with Paul Deppler and Margaret Maurice. Andres Galdames and Lori Carrier completed the original lineup, so named in tribute to ex-major league slugger Mario Mendoza, whose .215 lifetime batting average remains the absolute minimum any self-respecting ballplayer can maintain without banishment to the minors.

Formed from the remnants of Athens band the Incompetones, the Mendoza Line signed to local label Kindercore to issue their 1997 debut, Poems to a Pawnshop, which favored a more kinetic indie rock approach than the subtly pastoral sound introduced on the follow-up EP, Like Someone in Love. Shannon McArdle signed on prior to 1999's I Like You When You're Not Around, released concurrently with the group's relocation from Georgia to Brooklyn, NY. The superb We're All in This Alone, the Mendoza Line's first effort for new label Bar/None, followed in the spring of 2000, with Maurice leaving shortly thereafter. The mature and more variety-filled Lost in Revelry followed two years later. In 2003, their first album, If They Knew This Was the End, was reissued. Fortune arrived on Cooking Vinyl in 2004, followed by the Misra-released Full of Light and Full of Fire in 2005. The next year, guitarist Clint Newman and drummer Adam Gold took over duties for the live shows, and in 2007, the new lineup returned to the studio to create their final album, 30 Year Low, before officially parting ways.

Wikipedia:

The Mendoza Line is an expression in baseball in the United States, deriving from the name of shortstop player Mario Mendoza, whose batting average is taken to define the threshold of incompetent hitting. The cutoff point is most often said to be .200, and, when a position player's batting average falls below that level, the player is said to be "below the Mendoza Line". This is often thought of as the offensive threshold below which a player's presence in Major League Baseball cannot be justified, regardless of his defensive abilities. Pitchers are not judged by this standard, since their specialized work and infrequent batting does not require as much hitting competence. The expression has been also extended to other realms to indicate a low-end cut-off point.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Origin of the term[edit]

Mendoza, an effective defensive player from Chihuahua, Mexico, played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Seattle Mariners, and Texas Rangers and usually struggled at the plate. Mendoza was known as a sub-.200 hitter whose average frequently fell into the .180 to .199 range during any particular year — four times in the five years from 1975 to 1979.

The "Mendoza Line" was created as a clubhouse joke among baseball players in 1979, when from early May onwards, Mendoza's average was always within a few points of .200 either way, finishing out the season at .198 for the year (and .201 for his career to that point). "My teammates Tom Paciorek and Bruce Bochte used it to make fun of me," Mendoza said in 2010. "Then they were giving George Brett a hard time because he had a slow start that year, so they told him, 'Hey, man, you're going to sink down below the Mendoza Line if you're not careful.' And then Brett mentioned it to Chris Berman from ESPN, and eventually it spread and became a part of the game." Berman deflects credit back to Brett in popularizing the term. "Mario Mendoza — it's all George Brett," Berman said. "We used it all the time in those 1980s SportsCenters. It was just a humorous way to describe how someone was hitting."

Mendoza had two more full years in the majors, with a handful of plate appearances in 1982, ending with a career average over nine seasons (1974–1982) of .215. By that point, however, the phrase was already embedded in baseball culture.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Other uses[edit]

The term is also used outside of baseball to describe the line dividing acceptable mediocrity from unacceptable mediocrity:

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Alternate expressions[edit]

Another expression used in baseball to indicate that a hitter is not being effective is "On the Interstate", which derives from batting averages in the .1xx range looking similar to the route designations of the Interstate Highway System in the United States, in which roads are referred to using "I" to indicate an Interstate Highway, and a number to indicate the specific route. Thus a batting average of .195 looks roughly similar to "I-95", and the batter is said to be "on the Interstate."

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