Hail? Hale? Suddenly worried that I have this wrong and that the famously pedantic KC followers will correct me…

All hail Moeen.

Excellent fact. We like the sound of these Chicago Cubs fans.

There’s a famous statistic (that I can’t find a source for) that the Chicago Cubs’ attendance is more closely correlated with the price they charge for beer than the team’s performance.

All sounded pretty entertaining right up until the end there.

They play so many bloody games that averages and contributions to winning games should probably balance out.

I should go to more baseball games. But every time I do it goes wrong. Pretty much every side has a winning home record, yet the Mariners seem to lose 75% of the time I show up. Last time they were 10-0 down after four innings and went on to lose 16-1. And the beer was really expensive.

What?! No weighting for the amount of balls faced from left-handed bowlers or shots ending up in cow corner? Hang your head in shame.

That certainly seems to be the case more recently John, in these post-Moneyball days, but previously baseball stats were often a bunch of baloney, to borrow a phrase from America – RBI in particular is pretty meaningless.

Baseball does share with Cricket the sense that stats are in and of themselves meaningful though – players from the past are more often judged by their averages than by how many games they won, for example.

I quite enjoy baseball. I get the impression that the hardcore fans wouldn’t accept any form of statistic that requires less than fifteen linked spreadsheets to calculate. Much like cricket really.

A Godwin’s law for burly all-rounders, Ged.