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America has actually been keeping track of baseball longer than our country has been tracking the weather. For nearly 150 years, Baseball has been collecting data. It was the first sport to integrate and was a key piece in the Obama administration peace process with Cuba.
The casual viewer may be ignorant of the dramatic ways individual player stats can change within a single game or a single at-bat. A player has their batting average (AVG), their runners batted in (RBIs) and we even calculate their wins above replacement (WAR). This is is an interesting offensive stat because it actually calculates how many average players it would take to replace the value of this single player's contributions. That's right, we have so much data we can reasonably evaluate how many players one super player is worth!
For instance, Mookie Betts soon to be formally of the Boston Red Sox is the first player in all of baseball history to have won a Golden Glover award, a Silver Slugger, a batting title, the most valued player (MVP) AND a World Series all in one season. His WAR that year was 10.9. So almost 11 average players would be required to make up for the loss of Mookie Betts from the 2018 Red Sox roster.
MECA loves baseball because it brings the real-time praxis of Monitoring and Evaluation from right over the plate, to right out of the park.
