Sabermetrics: Baseball by the Numbers Baseball has always been a numbers game. Fans of the game grew up being able to recite them by heart; Ted Williams' .406 batting average, Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, Babe Ruth's 714 home runs. These numbers hold a special place in the history of the game. Stats like batting average, wins, home runs, and RBIs have always been there to tell us who the best players are. Does your favorite player have a .300 batting average? He's an All-Star. He hit 40 home runs and produced 120 runs? He is a candidate for the Most Valuable Player award. The best pitcher on your favorite team won 20 games? He is a Cy Young Award candidate. These stats have been used to evaluate player performance since the beginning of the game. What if we could dig deeper? What if there was a better method than batting average to determine who the best hitters are? What if we had a way to know who the best pitchers are rather than relying on counting statistics, like wins? Welcome to the world of sabermetrics. It's not possible to talk about sabermetrics without talking about Bill James. Bill James is widely known as the face of sabermetrics. While working as a night watchman at the Stokely Van Camp pork and bean cannery in Lawrence, Kansas, Bill James began working on his ideas about how major league baseball games are won. His self-published newsletter, titled Baseball Abstract, marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of the game. James's methods were later adopted by Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane to build surprisingly successful teams , which Michael Lewis wrote about in his best-selling book, Moneyball (Boudway).Sabermetrics is made possible in part because cha...... middle of paper ......rics and new statistics in baseball . Baseball @Suite101. suite101.com, January 20, 2010. Web. November 30, 2011. Jaffe, Chris. “Interview with Bill James.” Hardballtimes.com. The Hardball Times, February 4, 2008. Web. November 23, 2011. Kuper, Simon. "Michael Lewis and Billy Beane talk Moneyball." Slate.com. The Slate Group, November 13, 2011. Web. November 30, 2011. “Moneyball: Detecting How Statistics Win Games” npr.org. NPR, September 23, 2011. Web. December 2, 2011.Silverman, Jacob. “How sabermetrics works.” howstuffworks.com. HowStuffWorks, Inc, and Web. December 2, 2011. Slusser, Susan. "Michael Lewis on A's 'Moneyball' Legacy." SF door. Hearst Communications, September 18, 2011. Web. December 2, 2011. Somin, Ilya. “Rating Billy Beane and Moneyball.” volokh.com. volokh.com, August 20, 2006. Web. December 2, 2011. Thompson, Dick and Tom Hufford. “A History of the SABR.” miners.sabrwebs.com. SABR, nd Web. November 23. 2011.