If ever there was a match made in heaven, it’s the marriage of baseball and statistics and, as in all happy marriages, each partner contributes its most valuable assets: • Baseball, its sheer visual beauty, joy of competition, the thrill of bat meeting ball, ball meeting glove, pregnant pauses that culminate in seconds of excitement and agony. As the eminent philosopher–baseball fan Morris R. Cohen put it, an “extraordinarily rich multiplicity of movements.” • Statistics and their pliability as an analytical tool. Through the manipulation of them, we can tell who are the premier performers in this game that so enchants us with its speed, powerful grace and.
