baseball is a sport whose statistics are ingrained in the collectiveconsciousness of their fans. ask any baseball fanatic to identify thesenumbers, and the response should be immediate: 56, 2130, 2632, 61 in 61,73, 4191, 4256, .406, 714, 755, 5714, 511, 7. baseball fans also like toargue about which player or team is better, and the extensive history andrich landscape of numbers in the sport lends itself to spirited chats overa hot stove as well as mathematical analyses. it is not quite the hotstove season, but we will chat about some of the mathematics used toanalyze baseball statistics -- the study of baseball statistics is knownas "sabermetrics." mathematical ideas like markov chains, monte carlosimulation, and linear regression are used to shed new light on americas sporting pastime. some rudimentary knowledge of baseball and baseballstatistics is probably helpful, but not absolutely necessary.