No, you can't use the average

When we tell you young sprouts that you should never write puns as headlines, it isn't because we want to crush your souls. OK, it isn't just because we want to crush your souls; the larger reason is that you should never write puns in headlines unless you are very, very good at it,* and on the off chance you are, whatever story you're hedding probably doesn't lend itself to the pun treatment anyway. 

Should you think all the soul-crushing is worth the candle, though, several things must ye do. One, make sure the pun works literally as well as figuratively. The headline is still supposed to deliver the mail, after all, and if cleverness gets in the way of telling your audience what went on, best to omit the cleverness.** Two, it's a headline, so any of the facts it sets forth need to be clear -- not just implied -- in the text. So if you've bet your immortal soul on "Fast four-ward" in the hammer and reminded us in the deck to expect "a quartet of reasons to care," you probably shouldn't start by offering three reasons to care:

• The Tigers play baseball
• Baseball is fun
• In January, you'll wish you could watch the Tigers and the Royals!

That's as may be. I suppose the job of the columnist is to stir up all the people who will have their hands full with basketball and hockey by then, but it's still only one reason, for a total of three.

OK, it's sports, and nobody said there would be math. But proceed to the jump:

No, that's five reasons. (You can tell, because it says "Here are five reasons.") You can't take the average of three on the front and five on the jump and call it a four-peat "fast four-ward." That's not how measures of central tendency work.

Are there more important things to worry about? There are certainly more important topics to worry about (and if you're expecting major regional papers to have the sort of alarm-bell effect about crises that they might have had two decades ago, you are in for a long wait). But that doesn't mean there's no relationship among the skills involved. Editors are the quiet kids at the end of the row who look at their own scorecards to check when the announcer makes some proclamation. With some care and feeding, they grow up into the quiet kids who check their own scorecards at news conferences when the secretary of state is describing the latest outrage from Iran. That still doesn't mean they get to do puns in headlines, but it might give a sense of purpose to the otherwise routine soul-crushing.

* Sort of like your NBA career. If you were that good, we probably would have noticed by now.
** But come hear the paper in Toronto next month that tells you why this maxim is slipping from our grasp as well.