Stathead!

Like a lot of things in early baseball history, the inventor of the box score is wreathed in controversy, but many acknowledge Henry Chadwick, a Brooklyn based sportswriter, as one of its first and most ardent proponents.  As far back as the 1850's.

With so many sources of news and realtime information about games today, the venerable box score is disappearing from the back of newspaper sports sections where for years whole pages of agate type were devoted to them. You can still see them, MLB.com publishes the boxes for every game, but... .

For my 13th birthday my parents gave me one of my best presents ever, a subscription to the Sporting   News a weekly national newpaper that, in those days, chronicled baseball.  I think it arrived in the mail every Wednesday and I'd spend the rest of the day, deep into the night, poring over a week's worth of box scores, reliving every minute of the games of my hero, Ted Kluszewski.

Of course, the box scores were accumulated into long tables listing player performance.  And over the years the batting average and earned run average proliferated into a dizzying number of statistical abbreviations like BABIP and WHIP and igOPS and WAR.  You'll quickly become confused, but you'll learn a lot about your team or any player if you start poking around sites like baseballreference.com or fangraphs.com.   There are lots of other good sites and this infatuation with numbers has migrated to all the other major sports, too. Watch out!  This stuff is addictive.

To finish where I started, my reference to teaching statistics as a tactic to avoid talking with people sitting next to me on an airplane... well, there was once when it didn't work and a couple of times when I wisely didn't invoke the rule.

Only once did anyone want to pursue a high-altitude statistics chat.  Some OCD jerk who must of missed his days asking inane questions from the back of the lecture hall, boring his classmates and irritating his professor, really wanted to talk about the difference between variance and standard deviation.  You can be sure I gave that cretin far more than he ever asked for.  I had that horse's ass drawing normal curves on the back of paper drink napkins!

And, I made it a policy to suspend my silence policy if my seatmate was a very attractive woman.  In over two million miles of flying, except for times sitting next to my beautiful wife, Kathleen, that happened maybe six times or, once every 386,870.8 miles.  You can look it up!