I came to suspect at the ripe old age of 12 that baseball was invented by adults as a sneaky way to get me interested in math. It was my first experience with a conspiracy theory.

As kids, we spent the summer more or less obsessing about baseball. We played ball pretty much all day, every day. When we weren't playing baseball, we were watching it at one of the local parks, listening to it on the radio, reading about it in the morning paper to see what our favorite teams and players had done the day before or collecting baseball cards with pictures and stats of famous and not-so-famous players.

Stats. Once we discovered those a whole new world of baseball math opened up. Since we had favorite teams, we were interested in the pennant races. That meant keeping track of win-loss percentages and the more mysterious number in the daily standings -- Games Behind.

If two teams have played the same number of games and one of them has won three more games than the other, the second team is three games behind the first. We got that. We also understood a win was worth half a game and a loss was worth half a game. But we had a heck of a time calculating the right Games Behind number when two teams had played a different number of games. My buddies and I actually spent a couple weeks one summer figuring it out. And we felt pretty smart when we finally broke the code.

The pitchers all had that mysterious Earned Run Average (ERA) statistic. We had to figure that out, too. It was complicated. You had to know the difference between earned an unearned runs, the number of innings pitched -- there were fractions involved -- and then divide everything by nine.

Go Figure: Fun With Numbers

Every time we figured out one statistic, another one showed up for us to decipher. That's where the conspiracy theory came in. I figured the adults had to be making these things up one at a time just to get me interested in math. The joke was on them. I already liked math, and noodling with the stats was fun. So, I went along with their silly little conspiracy -- which, of course, the adults in my life knew nothing about. Like many conspiracy theories, it was all in the mind of the beholder. In this case, me.

Baseball cards also exposed us to the law of averages -- and another conspiracy theory. We wanted to know why it was so much easier to get cards of the not-so-famous players than the ones we really cared about. The law of averages said we should have gotten our share of both. We suspected an adult conspiracy to limit cards of the famous players to keep us buying more cards. I still think there may be some truth to this theory.

Kids don't play as much baseball as we did when I was young. But there is a statistics and numbers side to all sports. It's just that some of the numbers people care about have changed. For example, we're going through baseball mania here in Denver because the Colorado Rockies are on their way to the World Series for the first time ever after sweeping past the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League Championship Series. I've seen a couple stories about the TV ratings for the Rockies-Diamondbacks series being a record low. Nobody gave that sort of thing any thought when I was a kid.

Trading Pigs' Skins For Peanuts and Cracker Jacks

And we've seen an interesting flip in local sports coverage.¹ Until this year, you had to look for stories about the Rockies' games on the day of and day after Denver Bronco football games. We were awash in stories about the Broncos, but the Rockies had to settle for stories hidden inside the sports section somewhere.

That's changed this year. The Rockies are getting all the coverage. The Broncos got thumped in the last time they played. But you'd hardly have known it from the sports coverage. It's the Broncos who have become invisible this year. Everybody likes a winner, even the folks who put together the sports pages. If the Broncos keep losing who knows what we'll see on the front page of the Monday newspapers. News maybe?

But back to baseball. I have one final dilemma: Do I buy a ticket to one of the World Series games here in Denver. Or one of those fancy big flat screen TV's? I figure the street price for either choice will be about the same. I'll have a front-row seat for all the games with the TV. And that will boost my GPB (games-per-buck) average. But my thrill-of-a-lifetime score will be a lot higher sitting in the stands. Given a choice, which one would you pick?