![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcPz4nrtsb1CV7sEXuFEgbtmXbgyLgQwxe84qgRyL8WsM7WTLKFCMKkYyW8a3G03pNXk1IvRi9prZLW0dN8Dxf_FlumBzTWW5lueul1NNxHx8lt3MHbm_LpjAHXAVKqACJyfu-7_UNQVY/s1600/Bartolo_Colon.jpg)
Then there's the story of the movie MoneyBall, and the real-life exploits of the Oakland A's in the early 1990s and the Boston Redsox on the early 2000s- proving that focusing on some statistics- the more important ones- does deliver results.
I bring all this up because I just read this article: http://www.athleticsnation.com/2013/6/12/4419388/bartolo-colons-historic-season. It's about the A's Bartolo Colon, who is having a good season pitching, while walking very few batters. And to quantify Colon's season, the author has dug deeply into the data (big data) to find the player's walks per nine innings of pitching and to calculate the player's walk percentage of total batters faced. But not just that-- also, the percentage of pitches in the strike zone, as called by the umpires, and of course, the percentage of pitches in the strike zone, as determined by Pitch f/x (which tracks the number of pitches that a pitcher throws both in and out of the strike zone, no matter what the umpires actually call the pitch).
So what does this all mean in the greater scheme of things?
Almost nothing.
But it makes me love baseball even more!