About the author  ⁄ Zach Sommers

Zach Sommers is a writer based in Toronto with unfortunate obsessions for baseball's most irrelevant franchise, football's most-likely-to-move-to-LA franchise, and hockey's most hated franchise. He's been told to be excited about writing for Sports UpFront, and he always does as he's told (ladies...). A graduate of Carleton University and the College of Sports Media, Zach gets a little too excited every time Clayton Kershaw throws a curveball. He can be reached at zach.sommers@sportsupfront.com and followed at @zsommers.

It’s pretty much impossible to watch baseball without numbers.

Watch a game on TV and you’ll see the score is tied at two, with two outs in the fourth inning and the batter has a .290 batting average and the pitcher will throw his first strike and now the batting average switches to .250 because that’s how well he hits on a 0-1 count.

Watch a game live and you’ll see the multi-million dollar giant TV screen spout batting average, runs batted in, home runs, pitch counts and how many doubles the batter has gotten during his eight-game hitting streak. It’s no wonder why in baseball, more than any other sport, historical numbers mean so much.

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