Baseball in the age of analytics has created an alphabet soup of statistics: ERA, ERA+, WHIP, OPS, OPS+, RISP, OBP, wRC+, BABIP, WAR, xFIP.
But there is no way to quantify pressure, and no way to predict how a player will react to it.
I bring this up because one of the first things I did Friday evening was read the box scores to see how former Rockies Trevor Story and Jon Gray did in their debuts with their new teams.
It wasn’t great.
Story, who signed a six-year, $140 million contract with the Red Sox, went 0-for-5 with a strikeout and left four runners on base in a 6-5 loss to the hated Yankees.