Back in the 1980s, it was referred to as sabermetrics. Its name was derived from the acronym for an organization called the Society for American Baseball Research. At its most simple, sabermetrics is applying statistical analysis to individual players as a means of comparison and evaluation. It went beyond calculating batting averages and tracking the number of home runs. So much information on seemingly every variable imaginable was gathered, placed into algorithms and analyzed that sabermetrics boasted the ability to analyze and predict the natural skills of players, such as a statistic called “eye” or “batting eye.”

I’m sure many have experienced a Little League game where a youngster allowed a “ball” to pass by without swinging and a roar of proud parents would yell, “Good eye, Bobby!” It was a simple way of encouraging a young player for good strike zone judgment. With sabermetrics, batting eye, or eye, is defined as walks divided by strikeouts and is “considered to be a good measure of a player’s strike zone judgment.”