Baseball stats are a never-ending source of enjoyment for all of us. They started with the back sides of baseball cards and have graduated to baseballreference.com.
Stats have birthed SABRmetrics and encouraged a myriad of books, websites, and other informative sources to measure how teams and players have performed.
You can keep as many stats as you want. However, if it you are new to replays, I start small and grow into what you can and want to keep. At a minimum you will likely want to record:
· Game-by-game scores
· Daily standings
· Individual batting stats
· Individual pitching stats
· Team batting stats
· Team pitching stats
Digging deeper, beyond the obvious game-by-game scores and standings, you will need to ask yourself “Which individual stats do I want to keep?” and “What kind of systems exist to help me keep up with the numbers?”
That leads to individual stat-keeping, which we will deal with a couple of blogs from now.
For the moment, let’s focus on the big picture team items: recording game scores and keeping the daily standings up to date and accurate.
Next: recording game scores
Hi Rod,
I know you are big on planning ahead with your replays. This area is one place where it really pays off. Once you start your replay and start keeping stats, it’s hard when you decide “Maybe I should keep GIDP stats too.” or “It would be nice if I had HRA”.
Believe me, I’ve been there. :)
Plan ahead. Decide ahead of time which stats you want to keep and which aren’t important to you. Even give a day or two to think about it. It’s hard to go back. Even if you can tally the stats from scoresheets, you still need to redo your whole stat keeping method for all your teams/players.
Thanks Rod!!
Tom
I read this as I grind through the updating of my lifetime stats from my recently finished season. It will be about a week in total to finish.
So if you want to do lifetime stats be warned.
Seriously, just do Ballscore/Ballstat.
It has a learning curve and is frustrating at first, but for reducing mistakes and keeping all sorts of stats, it is great for replays.
And if you score games correctly, you can decide 100 games in to pull stats you did not consider at first because they are already there waiting for you.
It has been invaluable for my 1932 mini-replay.
Ballscore/Ballstat looks great, but I operate off a Mac, so looks bleak for using it. I have Excel templates that I use to total stats at the end of each “month.” Would love it if there were a counterpart to Ballscore/Ballstat in Mac format.