More than any other sport, statistics are very much a part of baseball. Since the beginning of the sport, fans have wanted to know who had the most hits, who made the error, who got the win, and so on. Home run totals, batting averages, wins, strikeouts—they are all a central part of baseball's popularity. Sometimes when a player was on the verge of breaking a record, like when Cal Ripken Jr. played in his 2,131st game, or when Hank Aaron hit home run number 715, or even when Derek Jeter got his 300th hit, the individual achievements of the players got more attention than the ballgame. That's part of what makes baseball so interesting. Your team may not be doing well, like the Giants in 2006, but you might want to watch them any way to see a slugger like Barry Bonds pile up home runs on his way to a record.

There's a stat for everything in baseball. You could probably find the answer to “What pitcher threw the most wild pitches in night games at Wrigley Field in the 1940s?” Okay, so that's a trick question—there were no night games at Wrigley in the 1940s because they had no lights. But the point is that if you love statistics you could probably spend a year looking at baseball statistics and never see the same one twice.