In sports, people often say that a team is "playing 500", meaning that they have the same number of wins and losses for that season.
1 Answers
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As a longtime fan of mediocre baseball teams and of Bill James, I am very familiar with the term "playing .500," meaning to win as many games as you lose over a specified period of time—81–81 over a full 162-game season, for example. The .500 is a simple fractional figure, indicating a win rate (or "winning percentage") of .500 out of 1.000—or 1 out of 2. As AlanCarmack notes in a comment elsewhere on this page, baseball is especially prone to calculate three-digit "percentages" that begin with a decimal point. More often than not, sportswriters and sportscasters use the longer expression "plating .500 ball" or "playing .500 baseball."