Statistics

Being the life-long baseball fan that I am, the transition into not having up to fifteen games to follow every day is becoming difficult. Now that the playoffs are into the second round, there are at most two games in a single day. Within another week, there will be only one... then... none... that is - until April when it starts all over again. So, why is baseball season the best time of year? Statistics. Along with the fifteen games to follow every day, there are fifteen box scores to scan through and scads of statistics to catch up on. You will find that most true baseball fans are obsessed with statistics. Now, I'm not talking about the people that keep track of the hometown team, or watch the weekly or daily highlights on Sportscenter, or go to one game a year and call themselves fans - I'm talking about the true fans of baseball - the fans that can name players on every team past and present, the fans that know and understand the differences between the American and National Leagues, the fans that can be interested in watching a minor league team play because they'd know about players that have potential before they even make it to the majors. True fans of baseball love statistics and they can bury themselves in them (www.baseball-reference.com is a great site, by the way - literally every stat you could imagine).

And let's be honest, football season is great and fun to watch, but the pros have 16 games in a week, and that just doesn't cut it in terms of what really matters and that's massive amounts of data. Since the baseball season coming to a close, I'll just have to settle for the scores of data that I collected yesterday and will be collecting in the near future. Not that pouring through data as part of my job will be personally fulfilling or as interesting as baseball stats, but it'll hold me over for now. Oddly enough, this project that I'm working that is producing this ridiculous amount of data will likely be finishing up sometime just before the next baseball season starts... Was that planned? Not intentionally, it just happened that way. So, does enjoying baseball statistics make me a nerd? Maybe, but by stating that baseball statistics can be personally fulfilling most likely does. I have accepted what I am, and I'm OK with that.