How to win The Scatter

The Scatter puts two career stats on a chart, say home runs across and stolen bases up. Every notable player in the sport is a dot, but the dots have no names. Three players are named, and you drop a pin where you think each one sits. Each pin is worth up to 1,000 points, depending on how close it lands to the real dot.

The axes are not even

This is the most important thing to understand. Both axes grow by square roots, not in equal steps. Halfway along an axis isn’t half the total. It’s a quarter of it.

The game does this because most players are known for one stat and not the other. On an even scale, most of the dots would be squashed into one corner. The square-root scale spreads them out, but it means your sense of “where is 100?” has to adjust.

In practice: small numbers sit further out than you expect. If the steals axis runs to 900, a player with 100 steals isn’t hugging the bottom. He’s a third of the way up. People who don’t know about the square roots put low-stat players far too close to the edge.

Place the stat you know first

For most players you’ll be confident about one stat and fuzzy on the other. Lock in the one you know: find that value with the readout and keep the pin on that line. Then slide along it for the other stat. If you’re right on one axis, your whole miss comes from the other one.

Use the crowd

The dots aren’t random. They form a shape, and the named players are somewhere in it. Most of the chart is usually a dense cloud of solid careers, with a few outliers stretching toward the edges. If you’re placing an all-time great at one stat, look for the lonely dots far out on that axis. One of them is probably your player.

There’s a bonus for knowing your stuff: a pin dropped very close to a dot snaps onto it. Land near the right dot and you get the full 1,000.

How the scoring works

Each pin scores on its straight-line distance from the real dot, measured on the chart itself. A pin a tenth of the chart’s width away keeps about 450. Three-tenths of the chart away or more scores zero. A day is three pins, so 3,000 is perfect and 1,500 or more is a win.

Because the score drops off quickly, a hedge between two clusters is usually a bad idea. If you think a player is in one of two places, commit to the one you think is more likely. Halfway between them may be far from both.

Mind the corners

The bottom-left corner is where players with low totals in both stats live. The named players are among the best known on the chart, so they’re rarely down there. If your pin is heading for the corner, take another look. You might be thinking of the stat in the wrong units, or forgetting about the square roots.