The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics

"Sports journalist Schwarz brings to the fore this intelligent, smartly researched and often hilarious look at the use of statistics in baseball." —Publishers Weekly

In The Numbers Game, Alan Schwarz provides the first-ever history of baseball statistics, showing how baseball and its numbers have been inseparable ever since the pastime's birth in 1845. He tells the history of this obsession through the lives of the people who felt it most: Henry Chadwick, the 19th-century writer who invented...