Baseball, more than any sport, is a game of statistics. Sure, you can get wildly advanced statistics in any of the sports, but baseball is the one that did it first and the one that makes them the least coherent. In basketball, you want to track the number of points, rebounds, and steals. In football, it’s mostly just tackles and yards gained. But when it comes to baseball, nothing can be easy. Rather than track hits, one of the simplest and most commonly understood baseball stats, batting average, is the percentage of hits in a given number of at-bats - which are distinct from plate appearances.
MLB advanced stats cheat sheet
