Book excerpt: Sports revolve around two things: narrative and numbers. You need the narrative, otherwise why would anyone care? Rivalries, emotions, and sports legends all require it. But you also need numbers. Without them, there is no way to know who has won; numbers tell you which team is top of the table, or who is the world champion. Sports Geek offers a tour through sports debates and ideas that is both narrative and numerical. Teams in all sports use data to create extraordinary analyses of how their players perform, to assess tactics and to get an edge over arch rivals; but fans of a sport are rarely presented with challenging and informative data that would help them to further understand it. In Sports Geek Rob Minto brings together an encyclopedic knowledge and love of sports, a rigorous understanding of statistics, and access to cutting edge quantitative analysis and difficult-to-uncover data. He is also a storyteller. Though written with an expert's knowledge, there's nothing academic about Sports Geek; it is packed with captivating anecdotes--success stories and failures, anomalies and surprises--that show why the numbers are so important. Covering almost every imaginable sport, Sports Geek has international appeal; it embraces our global enthusiasm for competitive sports. Accessible, colorful, and filled with fascinating infographics, Sports Geek will arm sports fans with the information they need to have the edge in any debate.