Some of that new math

An endeavor usually done among friends or online and often involving smack talking, snacks and drinks has turned educational.
Ozaukee Middle School teacher Kevin Luedtke this summer for the second time ran a class called fantasy baseball.
No money or gambling was involved, but plenty of numbers were crunched.
“We ran it very similar to a fantasy league except we were the computer doing the calculations,” Luedtke said.
Students drafted their teams on the first day of class, picking from the top 500. Pitchers were excluded, but the class had to select one player at each of the other eight positions, as well as a ninth to be a designated hitter.
Games on three straight weekends counted, since baseball teams all play on Saturdays and Sundays. If a player had a day off, his replacement was counted.
They came into school on Monday and started doing the math to figure out how their teams did.
Home runs earned a half point, or 21/42, as Luedtke had students calculate it. Runs and RBI each received 14/42 of a point, hits were 7/42 of a point and stolen bases and walks got 6/42 of a point.
Strikeouts and errors took scores down each by a -2/42 of a point.
Luedtke created a form from curriculum he bought a couple of years ago that showed students how to calculate their scores for each player, then added those together for their weekend points. A sample score could be 430/42, which they had to convert into whole numbers.
Therein was the beauty for Luedtke.
“The coolest thing that I saw was the number of students talking about fractions in real-life scenarios,” he said.
At first, numbers didn’t come easy. It took a few of days to figure out the scores.
“There’s a day or day and a half when you’re staring at numbers,” Luedtke said.
But students became faster and learned shortcuts as time went on.
“What used to take us three days took us one (by the final week),” Luedtke said. “The conversations I was having with you guys was really, really cool. So many times it took three steps to do something and these guys would skip a step and get it done.”
“It got easier,” fifth-grader Logan Mclarty said.
Students learned what to look for. If one of their players hit a home run, that automatically meant he got an RBI, run and hit.
They also learned what could affect how their players performed.
“Something I found out for picking players is some stadiums have shorter fences or the air conditioning makes the ball fly farther,” sixth-grader Mason Schroeder said.
They all learned that the ball flies farther in the thin air of Colorado, so games involving the Rockies could produce a high number of points.
When it came to drafting, students had to wrestle with the same issues as older fantasy players — balancing being a fan versus who puts up the best numbers.
Fifth-grader Nicholas Schubert took Christian Yelich with the first pick. Luedtke, who also participated, took Mookie Betts of the Boston Red Sox with the second pick, and Mike Trout of the Anaheim Angels went third.
Sixth-grader Dylan Budzisz took Paul  Goldschmidt with his first pick and then went with a homer team, taking Milwaukee Brewers Travis Shaw, Lorenzo Cain, Ryan Braun and Yasmani Grandal.
Fifth-grader Zak Miller took a flyer on Aaron Judge, who was hurt, but it worked out since he came back and scored well for him.
It turns out Yelich, who is having another stellar season, didn’t put up big numbers on weekends of fantasy league play.
Free agency was open on one day per week with the lowest-ranking teams able to go first. A trade window was also open for a limited time.
A scoreboard of team records and point totals was updated each week.
Luedtke, who said his friends wanted to know how he was doing, ended up scoring the most points in the league with 38-13/21. But his team, the Mississippi River Rafters, faced teams that scored high and he finished tied for fifth place with a 1-2 record.
One thing the league lacked was trash talking, though the boys have years to learn that fine art.
“These guys were really supportive of each other,” Luedtke said.
Sixth-grader Mason Schroeder even calculated the score of the classmate who knocked him out of first place who happened to be absent one day.
Luedtke found a trophy from 1979 in school storage somewhere that has “quite a bit of dust on it.”
Luedtke brought in former Northern Ozaukee School District teacher Mike Falkner, who has been a statistician for the Milwaukee Brewers and Milwaukee Bucks for decades, as a guest speaker. He said he never selects Chicago Cubs or St. Louis Cardinals when he plays fantasy baseball, and he chastised Luedtke for taking Cub Javier Baez.
Like Falkner, the students didn’t let the league impact their allegiance.
“We still love the Brewers,” Budzisz said.
“I still love Yelich,” Schubert said.
They have already had casual discussions of a possible fantasy football league as a middle school club.