A feast of data, with a slight glaze
On my ninth birthday, I was given a book, ''Modern Baseball Strategy" by famed manager Paul Richards. After reading how games are managed, and how lineups are constructed, I came away thinking the two absolute coolest things in the universe would be to bat either third or fourth in a big-league batting order.
At that time, I was reading every baseball book a 9-year-old mind could absorb, works such as ''Baseball's Greatest Players" by Tom Meany, ''The Babe Ruth Story," also by Meany, and ''Bob Feller's Strikeout Story," among many, many others.
Ah, the age of true diamond innocence.
For nowadays the fare is meatier, denser, and downright intellectual. The subject is still baseball, which remains what it has always been: the greatest game ever to spring from the mind of mortal man. But the approach is a bit different.
As Exhibit A, I submit ''Baseball Between The Numbers," a book that comes with its own caveat emptor in the form of an ominous subtitle: ''Why Everything You Know About The Game Is Wrong."
''Baseball Between The Numbers" comes to us courtesy of ''Baseball Prospectus," a consortium of numbers-oriented baseball scholars whose website, www.baseballprospectus.com, is regarded as must daily reading by the growing number of people who cannot ever delve deeply enough into the intricacies of baseball. Edited by Jonah Keri, this book is a combination of essays, charts, footnotes (36 pages of 'em), and even a 20-page glossary.
Said glossary is a must, unless you are someone for whom the acronyms FRAR, EqA, MLU, SNLVAR, BABIP, ARP, WXTL, DIPS, EqBR, PECOTA, and, most of all, VORP are readily identifiable references.
BA? RBI? ERA? They still exist in the Baseball Prospectus world, but they are either utterly irrelevant (batting average) or very misleading (RBI and ERA). In any event, to the dedicated Baseball Prospectus type, they are laughably juvenile, entry-level statistics for beginners only. No self-respecting Baseball Prospectus devotee cares who wins the batting title -- ever.
So let's talk VORP.
VORP stands for ''Value Over A Replacement Player" and is explained as follows: ''the number of runs a player contributes beyond what a replacement-level player (defined as a fringe major league player readily available off the waiver wire) at the same position would contribute if given the same percentage of team plate appearances."
Stripped to the core, VORP simply wants to identify baseball's true pecking order at any given time. Forget ''feel." Forget ''anecdotal evidence." Just put the numbers in there, crunch 'em, and accept the verdict, whatever it may be.
What lends credibility to VORP is the sheer volume of information that can be used in its determination. That almost unimaginable volume of data is the overwhelming revelation for those of us who are more inclined to employ the aforementioned anecdotal evidence method of arriving at these conclusions, rather than relying strictly on the numbers.
Time and again while reading this book I was dazzled by the intense depth to which these researchers are willing to go. The question that kept running through my head was, ''Who has time to do all this?" (I am operating on the assumption that the folks in question do whatever it is they do pertaining to baseball in their spare time.) The depth of their knowledge is not merely formidable or impressive. It is downright frightening.
The raw information was always there, if only someone knew how to obtain it. Now it truly is obtainable. We will never know the play-by-play of every major league baseball game played in 1906, for example, but one hundred years later, every pitch in every game is charted. What was thrown (insofar as we can accept the accuracy of the inspector), where it was thrown, where, if hit, it landed, etc. Every pitch. Every game. Armed with this information, we now actually know exactly what we don't know.
Bear with me here. One of my favorite passages in the book occurs on Page 121: ''In any one year, there are certain situations that almost never arise. For example, in 2004, no visiting team ever found itself in a tie game with no one out in the fourth inning with men on second and third."
This factoid evolved from a discussion of something known as ''Win-Expectation," and was itself involved in a discussion of the Dave Roberts stolen base (if you ask which Dave Roberts stolen base, then I think you've accidentally wandered into the wrong section of the newspaper). One of the things these people have computed is the chance of victory based on game situations. With 30 years of data to work with, they can do this without fear of contradiction. If you'd like to know just how much the Red Sox' chances of winning Game 4 increased when Roberts stole second, it's here.
On this level, the Baseball Prospectus people are untouchable and must be listened to. But it's the things that ask us to make a leap of faith into the scientific capabilities of their collective brain that trouble me somewhat. So much of what they do requires us to accept things on their mathematical say-so.
They are in love with the concept of ''equivalency," for example. They say that to make proper evaluations, both contemporary and across eras, we need to account for all sorts of variables, one of the largest of which is venue. What took place in the South End Grounds between the Red Sox and Tigers in 1904 must somehow be ''adjusted" in order to link it with what will take place when these same teams meet on June 2 in
I am not suggesting they are dour, pointy-headed academics and nothing else. The chapter titles alone reveal something of a baseball soul. ''Was Billy Martin Crazy?" ''Five Starters or Four?" ''Is David Ortiz a Clutch Hitter?" ''Is Mike Matheny a Catching Genius?" ''Is Joe Torre a Hall of Fame Manager?" ''What Happened To Todd Van Poppel?" And my favorite: ''What if Rickey Henderson Had Pete Incaviglia's Legs?" There is also a chapter about Billy Beane whose title, believe it or not, I cannot repeat here.
I enjoyed the book, but I guess the question I'm asking is simply: How much do we need to know? At what point do our eyes just glaze over and we say, ''No mas"? Does knowing VORP or FRAR enhance my appreciation of this game I'm watching? Do I feel smarter for knowing some of this stuff, or dumber for not knowing enough of it?
What would it be like to sit through nine innings with one of these Baseball Prospectus guys? That's the real issue.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com. 
