As you may have surmised one of my favorite things about baseball is the numbers aspect of the game. I’m not sure exactly how old I was the first time I cracked open my the giant book of baseball players and stats that my parents kept on their coffee table, but I do know I was hooked immediately. There were whole teams and leagues that didn’t exist anymore. There were periods where the game fundamentally changed like the Dead Ball Era. There were scandals and characters. Most importantly, there were numbers. Numbers that told the tale of this game across the years:
- 2,632
- 5,714
It was part of what made the home run race of 1998 so compelling, not one, but two players chasing down the home run record.