A week and a half ago, I came home from work to my fiancee watching a baseball game. “I’ve decided to like baseball,” she said.

Before this, her interest in any sport at all was none. If not negative. Any sports fan who has ever dated a non-sports fan knows that this is kind of like finding plutonium in the backyard – extremely exciting, but absolutely necessary to handle with complete care.

I had been advising her she might like baseball for a while, for a simple reason – she loves numbers. She is a game designer as well, and in her work doing so, she loves data mining, statistical analysis and combing through logs, trying to find information and trends that explains why the players do the things they do. For her, finding a statistical anomaly like “Males like to play warriors, women like to play druids” is like finding buried treasure – all player decisions are rational. There’s a REASON for that, just waiting to be explained.

Baseball is a number cruncher’s dream sport. All players can be divided into two types: pitchers and batters. Most everyone bats, and more to the point, their batting ability is pretty independant of what their teammates have done – when you’re at the plate, you’re all alone. This is in direct contrast to other games: in other sports, your scoring chances depend a lot on your position, and your teammates. Many sports (such as football) have many positions with few, if any, stats worth quantifying, making it hard to compare players.

Baseball has more than a century of classic stats. What caught the fiancee’s eye, though, was the renegade statisticians, who claim that virtually every manner in which baseball stats have historically been compared and considered is wrong. They espouse Sabermetrics, which embraces a more statistical, analytical approach to baseball. The online heart of their philosophy can be found at Baseball Prospectus. The soul can be found at Fire Joe Morgan. These guys, like her, are all looking for buried treasure, deep within the matrix.

Renegade stats are the epitome of cool to her.

On Saturday, we drove to Houston to watch the Astros play the Cardinals. I paid a pretty penny for the tickets, but it seemed worth it, as apparently this weekend is the last weekend in which a team that doesn’t suck will find it’s way into Texas. It was almost an excellent introduction, as the Astros came from behind to take a 6 to 4 lead into the 9th inning. Unfortunately, the Astros managed to blow the lead, and send the game into extra innings, losing in 11. She was enervated in the 8th, and bored in the 11th. On the way home, she was ranting about the need to send Brad Lidge to the minors. Ahhh, fandom!

Personally, I haven’t been a big baseball fan for a while. I was a huge fan when I was a kid, but since then, football has taken my heart. Still, I’ve been cultivating this as best I can. Watching the game and remembering, I used to LOVE this sport. Maybe, now that the Yankees are in remission, I can give it my attention once again.

All the same, I’m continuing to point out that renegade statisticians can also be found at Football Outsiders.