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The Grand Unifying Theory
Before there was sabermetrics -- baseball's advanced form of statistical analysis -- there was Allan Roth. In 1954 he led an effort to create Branch Rickey's grand unifying theory, expressed in a mind-boggling formula and recounted in The Numbers Game (shown here, left page) that reduced everything about a player's performance to a single number. In so doing, Roth anticipated what today is known as on-base percentage (OBP) and slugging percentage (SLG), two figures that joined the batting average (BA) as standard player stats. |