Moneyball Invades Boston's City Hall, Where Everything Is Graded
- Data dashboards are popular as municipal-management tools
- City Score website mimics Fenway Park's Green Monster
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There is no place sports heroes cast a longer shadow than in Boston, where Red Sox immortal Ted Williams has inspired City Hall to come up with its own batting average.
The average on Thursday for Mayor Martin J. Walsh and his lieutenants was 1.36. That’s probably confusing even to diehards, since the best Williams ever hit was .406 back in 1941, a mark that hasn’t been surpassed since. But by the city’s unique calculations, batting a thousand or just above means that targets -- a pothole filled within one business day, for example -- are being met.