The quote “Baseball been berry, berry good to me” comes from one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits from the late 1970s. Garrett Morris played Chico Escuela, a retired Hispanic baseball player who knew very little English. His pat answer for most questions—“Baseball been berry, berry good to me”—became embedded in the American lexicon. Baseball is indeed “berry, berry good” to anyone who loves statistics. For more than 100 years, virtually everything that has ever happened in professional baseball has been recorded, collated, analyzed, tortured, and twisted into the most bizarre statistical oddities you might imagine. If you wish to know who holds the record for home runs on his birthday while batting left-handed on the road, someone has probably already determined the answer.

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