ABSTRACT
Baseball's marriage with numbers goes back to the origins of the sport. This chapter introduces three sources of freely available data, the Lahman database, Retrosheet data, and PITCHf/x data. In the 2007 baseball season Barry Bonds became the new home run king surpassing Hank Aaron's record of 755 career home runs. Babe Ruth provides a good illustration of the pitching statistics tables of the Lahman's database since he had a great pitching record before becoming one of the greatest home run hitters in history. On April 21, 2012, Philip Humber became the 21st pitcher in Major League Baseball history to throw a perfect game by retiring all the batters he faced. The outcome of the pitch is recorded by a stringer, while most of the remaining information is either captured by the Sportvision system or calculated from the captured data.
