More Keeping Stats By Hand

Another idea to save time

More Keeping Stats By Hand

In keeping with yesterday’s theme, I thought it would be important to save this post from APBA Between The Lines for posterity:

Here’s a complex system that a poster wrote in a thread that is somewhat obscure and has been supplanted by more recent threads:

It’s a pretty basic system — and it’s something that you can easily set up with a cheap composition book or another notebook.

There are a few important things to note here, of course:

You don’t need to keep every stat. Despite the modern emphasis on sabermetrics and certain analytical stats, the truth is that most replay projects don’t really need to go that deep. The emphasis should probably be on counting statistics, followed by rate statistics that are meaningful and easy to calculate — batting average, slugging percentage, on base percentage, ERA, and so on. OPS+, for example, is probably something you don’t need to worry about.

It doesn’t need to be complicated. There’s nothing wrong with simply tallying things up after every game and keeping a running total to the side. The emphasis needs to be on making it easy to keep stats, not necessarily on winning an award for style or creativity.

You need some kind of system. I’ve had replays before where I fell behind on keeping stats. You might not think much of it when you’re in April, but when you hit June and don’t know who’s hitting what or what the standings look like, you’ll start to get really frustrated.

Do you have any advice for keeping stats by hand?