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SOLERA DIAMOND VALLEY | JULY 2021 15 1913 Flora, ND, Antelope Valley Baseball Champions. Back row far right, my grandfather Oscar Roppe. Front row right, my father Sydney Roppe (five years old). Oscar would die five years later during the Spanish Flu Pandemic. Box score printed in the New York Times for the New York Highlander's first game on April 22, 1903 played against the Washington Senators. Hemet High School baseball team. Photo taken by my great-grandfather Thomas E. Rickard in 1904. By Dick Roppé, Resident O.K. fans, baseball season is now roughly half over. When I was a kid my buddies and I jokingly called them "satistics." We knew the batting averages (AVG) of our favorite players, as well as how many home runs (HR) and runs batted in (RBI) they had. As to pitchers, it was wins (W), earned run average (ERA) and strikeouts (SO). These acronyms are pretty straightforward and for the most part make sense. Pretty simple - right? Before I go any further, let's take a quick look at some baseball history. Contrary to earlier beliefs, Abner Doubleday was not the father of the game. Alexander Cartwright gets that credit. There are varying accounts of its early history so I looked for what I felt would be a fairly reliable source. This comes from ESPN.com. "June 19, 1846: On this day in sports, the New York Mutuals defeated the Knickerbockers 23-1 in four innings in the first baseball game ever played in New Jersey's Elysian Fields. The father of the game, Alexander Cartwright, served as referee (a position later renamed as "umpire"). Henry Chadwick, a young cricket reporter from England, chanced upon the game and quickly fell in love with it. Over the years Chadwick developed the system of statistics for analyzing the game, including batting average and ERA. Baseball may be America's past time, but its father is a Brit." Baseball "stats" go all the way back to 1858 when Chadwick created the box score. He also came up with the letter "K" to indicate a strikeout. Now baseball has sabermetrics. It's such a new term it won't be recognized by your spellchecker. Just what is it? It is defined as "The application of statistical analysis (analytics) to baseball records, especially in order to evaluate and compare the performance of individual players." Some time ago I saw the acronym WAR (wins above replacement). I looked it up because I didn't quite understand what it meant. Well, after an explanation of more than 250 words from the Major League Baseball website I still didn't understand what it was. To have a little fun, lets evaluate a fictional player using some current sabermetric acronyms. If this makes any sense to you, you're probably a baseball fan who has had far too much pandemic free-time! Here goes: Last year, in the shortened 2020 season, he had the highest P/PA of any NL player hitting in the four spot. His ISO led the team and his BABIP ranked 10th in the league. He ranked second in RC, however, his wRAA was slightly below his 2019 rating. Got it? Back in the day, a pretty good hitter, Pete Rose, was asked to describe his philosophy on hitting, his reply, "See the ball, hit the ball." A much simpler time… FYI – about 10 dozen new baseballs are used during the average nine-inning game. Baseball's Secret Code

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