Baseball Breakdown

Today I had one of those moments that made me realize what a huge dork I can be. I was reading Newsweek and I came upon this article in The Last Word feature. George F. Will discusses how extensive baseball statisticians can be. He says that it's like that because unlike other sports which are fluid, baseball is a game of isolated events which can be easily codified. He goes on to spout out various ridiculous statistics which no one has any business knowing. Such as noted in his opening paragraph

On average, Biggio's plunk have occurred 493 feet above sea level, up 36 feet after two plunking last year in Denver. The shortest pitcher to hit him? Byung-Hyun Kim (5 feet 9 inches). The average age and weight of the plunking pitchers are 28.5 and 200.22. He has been hit most often by pitchers whose astrologically sign is Sagittarius, but more Leos have hit him. He has been hit 15 times while Tiger Woods was on Sports Illustrated's cover. In 1997, the Dow rose an average of 28.63 on trading days after Biggio was hit.

The rest of the article goes on to discuss various other statistics that people have come up with and goes into a debate regarding the relevancy of OPS to scored runs.

Now the part that made me feel like a huge nerd is that I thoroughly enjoyed this impassioned obsession with numbers and statistics. I thought that it was amazingly cool that people were able to track all of these things and come up with oddities and patterns in the numbers. It made me really want to get involved in that sort of thing and greatly increased my appreciation for the sport of baseball.

I should have been an econ major...

Some will win
Some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues