Think of baseball, and you think of numbers. The last player to bat .400 was Ted Williams in 1941. No one’s come close to repeating Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in that same year.
Math’s importance to the sport is enduring. The statistical recap of each game (or box score) took shape in the 1860s, mere decades after the baseball’s invention. Expanding and refining data have gone hand in hand with the sport’s growth in the 19th and 20th centuries.