Baseball by the Numbers
Since we're clearly relaxing our way into summer (at least on this blog), I thought I'd talk about sports again. But really, I want to talk about statistics.
I got to thinking about baseball statistics last month after reading a post by one of the internet's brightest---Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket--- about the origins of Rotisserie/Fantasy baseball and the way we read games as culture.
The conversation about fantasy sports often intersects with the story of Sabremetrics---that is, the study of baseball by the numbers, the recent founding of which is traditionally attributed to the baseball writer Bill James and his famed Baseball Abstract.
My hunch is that Sabremetrics first erupted into polite culture by way of Steven Jay Gould. In his famous New York Review of Booksessay on Joe DiMaggio's streak he wrote:
Among sabremetricians1—a contentious lot not known for agreement about anything—we find virtual consensus that DiMaggio’s fifty-six–game hitting streak is the greates…
I got to thinking about baseball statistics last month after reading a post by one of the internet's brightest---Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket--- about the origins of Rotisserie/Fantasy baseball and the way we read games as culture.
The conversation about fantasy sports often intersects with the story of Sabremetrics---that is, the study of baseball by the numbers, the recent founding of which is traditionally attributed to the baseball writer Bill James and his famed Baseball Abstract.
My hunch is that Sabremetrics first erupted into polite culture by way of Steven Jay Gould. In his famous New York Review of Booksessay on Joe DiMaggio's streak he wrote:
Among sabremetricians1—a contentious lot not known for agreement about anything—we find virtual consensus that DiMaggio’s fifty-six–game hitting streak is the greates…