There is something I find tricky to explain about the thing that I love the most about baseball. When talking to English friends of mine and trying to link it to football, I always come back to a penalty kick. The taker is in the mind of the goalie and vice versa – they are thinking about the history of the taker’s previous kicks – if his last 5 have all gone to the bottom left, does that mean this one is more or less likely to go in the same place, the taker might know where the goalie is weakest – but if that same place is where he is weakest too, does he risk going there or not. Of course anyone who has watched a central defender step up and take a penalty in a shoot out and blast it high into the net, straight down the middle after a 10-foot runup will know that sometimes that psychological battle is ignore in face of ‘hit is as hard as possible.

I’m a paragraph into a post about baseball though, and I’ve managed to talk about nothing but football, so let’s take this back.

Take that chess game that takes place in the seconds before a penalty kick is taken, expand it out over 9 innings and around 3 hours, and you have the thing that I love most about baseball.

Hopefully the image to the left gives this a bit of context – taken from the wonderful https://www.baseball-reference.com website, this is a screengrab of all the hittings stats available on the Houston Astros player George Springer (a player I have taken entirely at random). Without even going into this level of depth, a casual fan watching a stream of an MLB game for the first time would be excused for thinking they need a dictionary and a maths degree to fully comprehend the array of statistics that carousel their way across the bottom of the screen and are flashed up and offhandly referenced at every moment of an at-bat. From the basic stats rattled off as if they are an extension of a player’s name to the sabermetrics at the cutting edge of old-school vs new-school debates – baseball is not just a sport that has embraced statistics, but one that comes close to living and dying by them.

So let’s come back to George Springer and what about a screenshot that no-one but the Excel-enthusiast in your office would get excited about, and why it makes me love baseball.

Let us imagine that we are in the 5th inning of a game.

The Houston Astros are playing the (wonderfully convolutedly named) Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

LA are currently 4-2 up.

The pitcher and the catcher meet at the mound, as they have just given up consecutive 2-out singles, leaving runners at first and third with George Springer,

What they will be discussing will be everything you see on the left-hand side, and how with every pitch that the pitcher throws, that a different set of the rows from that set of spreadsheet comes into play.

The reason why the chess match analogy is so apt here, is that like the best of the chess grandmasters, both pitcher and hitter are not just thinking of the moment that they are in now, but the moments that are to come and how what they do now will change the percentages and possibilities minutes or hours from now.

While some people will be entirely bored by the stop-start nature of baseball, this is the exact reason why it is so great.

At every moment, the statistics are flashed up for us on screen, so we know the hitters heatmap (where the strike zone is split into 9 sections, each colour-coded with their batting average, giving us a visual cue of where he may be stronger or weaker at hitting).

So if you are the pitcher and you see a batter is weakest on the inside half of the plate, is that where you look to go? But you know he knows this, so do you second guess and try and sneak a fastball past him on the outside corner? But then you know that he hits fastballs much better than offspeed pitches, so do you risk a curveball there, knowing that with RISP he actually hits curveballs at over a .300 clip. Then start combining those calculations, and throw in the rest of the permutations and combinations – did he strike out the first time up, did he go hitless yesterday, does he have an off day tomorrow, is a runner on third, does he have his lucky jockstrap on an so on and so on, and…

Now, like the central defender and the penalty shootout, I’m under no illusion that we have hundreds of polymaths in uniforms stepping into the batters box and onto the pitchers mound who are doing these calculations on each and every pitch, but… just to know this as a fan, and that some of them will be and the rest will have some kind of subconscious consideration going on is enough for me to delight in the slow burn of pitch-to-pitch and at-bat to at-bat.

When trying to contextualise why I find this area of baseball so compelling, I would always come back to the unarguable drama of the penalty kick in football. After a shootout victory by Germany over England in an U21 semifinal, the footballing world lost their minds reflecting on the Germany goalkeeper keeping a ‘cheat-sheet’ in his sock and whether this was the secret weapon behind his ultimately match-winning save against Nathan Redmond.

Some purists were up-in-arms – claiming this was ‘unfair’, while many others wondered why this was not standard practice.

For baseball fans watching on – they may well see the first seeds of the cold war that has now been going on for a decade or so, where old-school ‘eye test’ scouting and evaluation has come up against the new-school sabermetricians with their spreadsheets, stat-lines and number-crunching.

I tend to baulk at even the fantasy-football level of analysis that reduces football into hard statistics, and I don’t think I would ever welcome football being overtaken by cold, critical analysis of every moment – but equally I don’t think this would ever happen, as so much of what happens on the football pitch has to remain in the instincts and skills of the player in the moment.

I think that having these two sports side-by-side in my affections allows my heart to be satisfied by the unbridled, uncontrolled passion in the relentless 90+ minutes of a football game, and my mind to be satisfied by the 300 or so pitches in which one can over-think as much as one wants as you consider the tete-a-tete going on at any one time.

I would absolutely understand if you hate or love either of these for the exact reasons I’ve explained here, but I shall continue to revel in the company of both of them and the feast they serve up for me in their own individual ways.