Play Ball!

After losing ground to football and basketball, baseball might not be the national pastime anymore, but it is certainly the national bellwether, the sport that has defined America and charted its ups and downs.

Baseball has changed significantly in the last 15 years, along with the technological “advances” that have overtaken American culture. As Michael Lewis documented in Moneyball, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, built his teams by focusing on atypical statistics, such as O.P.S. (the combination of slugging and on-base percentage)—a revolutionary move in the early 2000s.