PHOENIX—Saying the breakthrough would change baseball statistics forever, the Society Of American Baseball Research unveiled a new analytics model Friday that measures the precise amount of joy their work sucks from the game. “For years, we’ve wondered exactly how much fun we drain from baseball, but finally, by combining the models from advanced statistics like OPS+ and BABIP, we were able to pinpoint the exact degree to which sabermetrics have turned America’s pastime into a miserable experience for casual and diehard fans alike,” said statistician and model co-developer Bill James, explaining that the model was capable of calculating a fan’s enjoyment down to the third decimal point, and measures the minute-by-minute fluctuations as they are bombarded with precisie, joyless stats like WAR and wRC+. “This model can pinpoint the exact moment in which baseball goes from an exciting spectator sport to a numbing slog, devoid of all mystery and drama. Best of all, with this new measurement, statisticians can see their precise performance and fine tune their cold, dispassionate analysis to maximise joy loss.” At press time, the statisticians had unveiled a new statistic to determine how much comparative joy loss a stat provided against a baseline generic joy loss stat.

Advertisement