Claude AI Bats .640

With Major League Baseball playoffs underway, a statistic worth considering:

Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941, succeeding on ~40% of his attempts. No one else has cleared the .400 mark.

My Claude AI bats .640: correct about 80% of the time, and with about 80% precision. 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.64. Or .640 in baseball parlance. 2-outta-3, in lay terms.

Where it hits

• Synthesis. I throw it a stack of documents — financial statements / P&Ls, Google Ads analyses, competitor website links — in whatever format they come in, and it synthesizes across all of them in seconds.

• Drafting. For engagement letters, competitive landscape summaries, and meeting outlines, it's the best thinking partner I've had.

• Iteration. I can work with it like a colleague: ask a question, push back on the answer, drill down, and get to correct through conversation.

Where it strikes out

• Hallucination. Claude invents specific facts — transaction multiples, company details, market statistics — and delivers them with the same confidence it uses for things that are unequivocally true. In M&A, wrong numbers are no bueno.

• Knowledge cutoff. It doesn't know current market conditions, recent transactions, or live deal comps, and doesn't always flag that it doesn't.

• Writing style drift. No matter how many times I ask, it gravitates toward single em dashes and contrasting staccato fragments. For example, the statement above in Claude-speak is "In M&A, a wrong number isn't an inconvenience—it's a liability." I need to humanize nearly everything it writes.

Life is now an open-book exam. Not only do I tell clients I use AI, but I'll show them what Claude produces, and where I've built upon it. They're not interested in becoming prompt engineers, so they're only too happy to let me and Claude do the heavy lifting.

The at-bats that matter most are the 9th-inning ones. So I use Claude as a leadoff hitter. It gets on base. I drive it in. Where it strikes out is where human judgment takes over: the calls that come from having sat on the client side at Fortune 200 companies, run marketing at a major agency, and led commercial due diligences at AlixPartners. The best of AI, augmented by human experience.

At Parallel-49, I help marketing services firm owners exit wealthier. Thinking about selling? michael@parallel-49.com