Baseball and it's statistics are inseparable, as lovingly intertwined as the swirls of a candy cane. And the funny thing is, they always have been. Most fans assume that baseball's infatuation with statistics is a modern phenomenon, a product of the computer age. But it is not, not by a longshot. Arguments over the relative merits of batting average and fielding percentage, runs scored, runs driven in, date back to the game's earliest days in the nineteenth century.

--From the introduction to The Numbers Game

The Numbers Game is a detailed and absorbing telling of the history of statistics in baseball, telling the stories of the people who sought to understand the game better, and to encourage others to do the same. The book is terrific, succeeding largely (and perhaps ironically) because it chooses to tell the story of the characters of those who have sought to quantify the game rather than the statistics itself. We see a history, not just of the game told through the lens of statistics, but of a segment of fandom. Everyone in the book (with the possible exception of its villain, Seymour Swiff, who seems to like power most of all and will probably regret refusing to be interviewed for the book) adores baseball with an all-consuming (and occasionally frightening) fervor.

We'll be discussing the book for the next week. I have a few questions to use as starting point, but the discussions will be very loose. Please feel free to follow the thread of conversations, as with any book club, though unlike other books clubs there will be no gossip or snacks. If you have a question you'd like to pose, please e-mail me.

The book seemed in many ways to function as a very long prologue to last year's selection, Moneyball, and it's interesting to see how old some of the conversations in Moneyball really are. (Not the least of which is people fearing stats will take over the game, in Numbers, a nineteenth century baseball writer fears the game "will be brought down to an almost mathematical calculation.")

I'd like to ask, first of all, what is it about baseball that has encouraged everything we see in this book? Is it merely that baseball is a series of definable player-events, or is there something more? Without Henry Chadwick, would we have SABR today, or were numbers something that were always in the game waiting to be found?

Secondly, how does the book work in conversation with Moneyball? What are the issues that have kept popping up from Henry Chadwick to Billy Beane? Would Chadwick approve of Moneyball?