Ever get the impression baseball is getting overwhelmed with numbers and formulas? Welcome to the club.
It used to be relatively easy with formulas like batting average, ERA, on-base percentage and numbers for the simple things like hits, walks, strikeouts, home runs, RBIs, and even wins and losses. Now we've got to work into the equation more advanced metrics like WAR (Wins Above Replacement), BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play) and FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching), just to throw out a few of the widely accepted ways we now measure performance.
And, if that isn't enough, the game itself insists on burying us with TMUI (Too Much Useless Information), the latest of which are rapidly becoming the most annoying -- exit velocity and the launch angle of batted balls. It was a cute little novelty when they began telling us approximate distances of home runs; we could pretty much tell for ourselves when a ball was hit exceptionally hard or high.
