Do baseball historians drool over a players stats?

Dave: Do baseball historians drool over a players stats because they never had the ability to compete in baseball?
Baseball historians & fans love drooling & comparing players stats
more then any other sport.
Who do the historians & fans fall in love with the stats of a ball player instead of actually playing the game for fun?
I actually played baseball at the little league & high school levels & it was all about having fun & not about stats.
Is it safe to say that the historians & some fans that never had the ability to play baseball enjoy drooling over a players gaudy statistics?

Answers and Views:

Answer by RWB4646
No
Stats have been a part of baseball since the beginning . I too had fun playing and was a halfway decent player but that has nothing to do with it . Keeping stats is a part of baseball and a way to remember just how good players were . For instance “Babe Ruth” . By keeping stats you can see when the steroid freaks started cheating . For instance “Barry Bonds” .

Answer by sarrafzedehkhoee
Actually, yes. The daily sports writers are so obviously wanna-bes, but they become vindictive and hag-like when the players don’t fulfill the fantasy.

Answer by Mad Hacker
Ahem, I played baseball in school too. I loved stats then, I love stats now. I loved playing then. I would love to play now if I knew of an adult league around here. I wouldn’t generalize dude.

Answer by Tom
Ahhh – the smell of stereotypes in the morning!

Just because you enjoy the statistical side of the sport doesn’t mean you’re a frustrated rightfielder or a wannabe closer. Baseball is BY FAR the most documented sport in terms of statistics. Kind of seems natural that people would take advantage of all that information, doesn’t it?

Answer by blueyeznj
Read Chapter One of “The Summer Game” by Roger Angell. He explains the allure of stats in baseball far better than I do.

Answer by ivystung
People love stats because they love the game and want to be able to understand it better. It’s nice to be able to compare players without just relying on biased gut instinct. Just because someone is interested in the statistical part of the game doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate the beauty of a well-turned double play or a huge sweeping curveball.
I think most baseball fans probably dreamed of being great players when they were kids but hopefully most adults have moved past that and aren’t frustrated by it.

Answer by Edik
Ha! It’s an interesting question, though obviously an unfair generalization. Certainly there are baseball historians who drool over stats because they compare those stats to those that they accumulated themselves while playing.

But I do think that there’s a lot of excessive stat-slinging that goes on. I’m guilty of it, too, because it’s easy to do. “Oh yeah? My player is better than your player because he hit .317 and yours only hit .304 in late-August Sunday afternoon games where the wind was blowing at 15mph, following a rainy Friday night, and had a runner on second in the 3rd inning.” We’ve got stats for everything, but most of them don’t tell us anything useful.

I’m not sure if baseball fans do more stat comparison than in any other sport, like you said. It’s possible, but it seems that football fans do this quite a lot as well.

Answer by Cali Surf
Just because someone keeps stats doesn’t mean that they suck. Maybe they’re retired or they would just rather keep stats because stats are the whole game. Without stats you would never know how good a pitcher’s certain pitch is, where the batter’s weak spot is, etc.

Answer by bruiserkc2
Baseball stats hold more meaning than other sports really. It’s just the way people dive into them and study them. You don’t see that in other sports. People know Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the all-time leading scorer in basketball history, but how many can say how many points he scored without having to look it up? Ditto with Emmitt Smith as the all-time leading rusher in football.