Baseball statistics

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Baseball statistics" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Baseball statistics include a variety of metrics used to evaluate player and team performance in the sport of baseball.

Since the flow of a baseball game has natural breaks to it, and player activity is characteristically distinguishable individually, the sport lends itself to easy record-keeping and thus both compiling and compiling statistics. Baseball "stats" have been recorded since the game's earliest beginnings as a distinct sport in the middle of the nineteenth century, and as such are extensively available through the historical records of leagues such as the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players and the Negro leagues, although the consistency, standards, and calculations are often incomplete or questionable.

Since the National League was founded in 1876, statistics in the most elite levels of professional baseball have been kept at some level, with efforts to standardize the stats and their compilation improving during the early 20th century; such efforts have continually evolved in tandem with advancement in available technology ever since. The NL was joined by the American League (AL) in 1903; together the two constitute contemporary Major League Baseball).

New advances in both statistical analysis and technology made possible by the "PC revolution" of the 1980s and 1990s have driven teams and fans to evaluate players by an ever-increasing set of new statistics, which hold them to ever-involving standards. With the advent of many of these methods, players can conditionally be compared across different time eras and run scoring environments.