The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics

The Numbers Game is the first-ever history of baseball statistics - the keeping of them, the study of them, the people who devised them, the cultural phenomenon of them, from 1845 until today.

Most baseball fans, players and even team executives assume that the National Pastime's infatuation with statistics is simply a byproduct of the information age, a phenomenon that blossomed only after the arrival of Bill James and computers in the 1980s. They couldn't be more wrong.

In this unprecedente...