Book excerpt: The modern game of baseball is a stark contrast to the game of the past and statistics have continued to move to the forefront of the game. Watching a game on TV or listening to it on the radio, one is constantly bombarded with numbers of all kinds - how can one make sense of it all? Numbers constantly fly across your screen during each game and even the more mature fans may not truly understand what they mean. As one can imagine, the diversity of baseball statistics, the methods that create them and the fans who follow them is immense. This book makes no attempt to develop the next 'super stat' or tell you why Babe Ruth is better than Barry Bonds (or visa-versa). It merely attempts to not only present all well-known baseball statistics, but to present it in a way as to help the reader truly understand what the statistic really means and how that statistic can be used. If you have ever flipped through the many books or encyclopedias on baseball statistics one will quickly come to a conclusion - any real explanation of these statistics are placed in the very back of the book (usually in very tiny text) and typically with no real discussion on their calculation, context, or application. This text attempts to not only standardize baseball statistics as a subject, but to allow anyone to understand these statistics as well calculate them - no PhD required (but I suppose it helps).