#BuckFiftyADay: Why Numbers Bore Me

Among those who earn (or used to earn) a living writing about baseball, I am in the minority. I’m not a numbers guy. Couple of reasons. One, I find reading about math to be tedious. Math -- charts, graphs, formulas and problems --is fine. But paragraphs written about numbers bore me. It’s homework. When reading a baseball story, I don’t want it to feel like homework. Buit biggest reason is that I’ve yet to see a stat that isn’t reliant on a reasonable “sample size.” Baseball is a game of situations. It’s a game of hot and cold. Can a manager who’s watching a guy who’s 0-for-his-last-15 with 10 Ks just sit back and wait for the “sample size” to expand? Or does he, in that moment, trust the guy who’s looking better in a recent stretch? For me, there’s way more to analyzing baseball than just doing the math.