But that’s OK! Because RBI is one of those stats that is part of baseball fans’ (and media members’ and players’) DNA, even though there are several stats more indicative of a hitter’s true worth. Like OPS! Oh, Bradley is only OPS’ing .776. Not terrible, but not great.

Anyway, after last night’s win against the Brewers — it’s gonna happen … do you know the Cubs have more than doubled their playoffs odds this past week, to 2.5 percent! — Milton Bradley has 40 RBI. Which seems incredibly low for a guy that’s had the majority of his at-bats in the middle of the order this season. But just how historically low is it for someone hitting in the middle of the order? Wezen-Ball crunched the numbers as of Tuesday morning — bless his heart — and came up with this:

It turns out that Bradley’s 39 RBI as a middle-of-the-order hitter, while low, is hardly historic. If the season ended before yesterday’s game, that total would place him tied for 34th fewest in the Retrosheet era. The “leader”, unsurprisingly, is from the pitcher’s heydey of 1966, when the Dodgers’ Tommy Davis had only 27 RBIs in 100 games and 330 PAs.

So yes. He doesn’t have many RBI. But he’s not historically bad. Hooray!

ESPN the Magazine writer Chris Sprow, who is someone anyone reading this should familiarize themselves with (he’s really good, is what I’m saying; he’ll be penning your favorite Magazine story soon, and you’ll look up at the byline and then you’ll be like “Oh, yeah, Eamonn told me this would happen,” and somewhere I’ll smile knowingly) has an excellent little piece today about soccer stats. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof.

See, soccer doesn’t have stats. Period. It has goals. Assists, kind of. But compared to most American sports, which are drenched in gooey statistical goodness, soccer has zilch. Sprow’s thesis is that this lack of stats is the barrier preventing soccer’s popularity in America. This is an interesting thought. (I told you he was really good!)

And in an argument- and fantasy-obsessed American sports society, soccer often does too. Part of the problem, of course, is the number of leagues there are. There’s no table that can tell us that 23 goals in the Premier League would mean 37 in MLS. There’s no algorithm to explain the assist rate from a Serie A midfielder as compared to the Mexican League. It’s about styles, systems and results. And darn right, it IS the most popular sport in the world. But it could never win out as the subject for a good American “bargument.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But if soccer could ever aspire to gain the cultural hold on America that it desires — this from a former college player who watches a ton of soccer and plays to this day — the solution is easy: Give us more numbers. Make ‘em the type we can really use.

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Sports, of course, exist solely as a means of aggregating and crunching data, and the easier said data is to digest, the better. Christopher Healey, associate professor at North Carolina State University, has constructed a set of visualizations that reflect each and every NFL game from last season. To show one example, here’s a visualization of the final ten minutes or so of the Bears’ season (sorry):

A brief “how to read this” tutorial is provided here. The green field represents the football field itself. The red represents the Bears’ offensive progress, the blue represents the Texans’, and the patterns represent whether the movement of the ball was a result of a pass, run  or penalty.

This visualization format isn’t completely new — if you’ve ever had to follow a game via ESPN’s GameCast, you’ll recognize it. These visualizations are far more concise, and more importantly, they’re provided for every single game last season. I mean, I just “watched” every game of the season by scrolling down this page for about three minutes. This is probably the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like Tank from The Matrix.

(Via.)