The Importance of Keeping Baseball Statistics

Video Transcript

"Statistics are vitally important to baseball. In baseball, again, we count everything. We want to know how many times you reached base if you get a hit, how many times you reached base via error, how many times you've reached base by getting a walk. We want to know what your fielding percentage is, your ERA, which is your earned run average, how many runs a pitcher gives up over a nine inning game. We want to know what his WHIP is. That's walks and hits divided by innings pitched, denoting how many walks and hits he gives up in a particular game. How many home runs does he hit? How many extra base hits do you get? We count literally everything. If you're a base stealer we want to know your stolen base percentage. How often you get thrown out when you try to steal a base. So if you want to understand the game of baseball, the first thing you need to do is understand how to calculate statistics, and that's what we're going to show you in this segment. And that's why kids at a very young age, before they learn much about baseball at all, they learn to tally up their box scores, and why it's important for you to know how to fill out your scorecard properly. Because, once again, in baseball, we count everything."