The Week by the Numbers: June 9-15, 2013

By Matt Phifer

Sometimes the real story is in the numbers.  This week is a short post, but these numbers pack a punch.

.161 – Ike Davis’ Batting Average When Demoted to the Minor Leagues

New York Met Ike Davis was demoted to the team’s Triple-A affiliate on June 9 after a dismal first portion of the season.  Davis’ batting average was just .161, the worst of any player in the Major Leagues with enough at bats to qualify for a batting title.  His slugging percentage against balls in the strike zone was just .333, which is down from .634 in 2012.

9,000-10,000 – The number of U.S. government requests for information from Facebook in the second half of 2012.

In the wake of the revelations that the NSA has allegedly been requesting information such as phone records, Facebook revealed in a blog post on June 14 that they received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for information from U.S. government entities in the second half of 2012.  The blog post said this ran the gamut from “things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat.”  Facebook said the data requests applied to between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.  Comparatively, there are 1.1 billion active Facebook users around the globe.