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8 PLAY BALL BAY AREA NEWS GROUP "A boxscoreis more than a capsule archive. It is a precisely etche d m iniat ur e of the sport itself, for baseball, in spite of its grassy spaciousness and apparent unpredictability, is the most intensely and satisfyingly mathematical of all our outdoor sports." —ROGERANGELL,THENEWYORKER Angell penned those lines for The New Yorker in the 1960s, when the promise of a new spring made him increasingly eager for his morning paper. There, over a half a cup of cof - fee, he could review the stat lines of Ferguson Jenkins, Al Kaline, Juan Marichal, Tony Oliva and "other ballplayers — favorites and knaves — whose fortunes I follow from April to October." Reconstructing a ballgame took some imagination in those days, even for someone adept at interpreting a hitter's stat line like 4-1-2-2. In contrast, anyone currently gearing up to follow the exploits of Mike Trout, Bryce Harper or Clayton Kershaw will find that the "precisely etched miniature" of yore has exploded into a sweep - ing, 3-D panorama. It's like opening Pandora's batter's box. The double play might go 6-4-3 if you're scoring at home, but MLB's Statcast is capturing that same play with radar technology that also has been used to track space shuttles — seriously — and recording each pitch at 40,000 frames per second. Statcast will use optical track - ing technology to follow base runners up the line at 25 frames per second, while also capturing the distance a fielder ran to make a catch and the velocity of the relay throw to first. The modern-day box score might require trips to websites such as FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, Baseball Prospectus and BrooksBaseball, but it is possible to now know, for example, that A's ace Sonny Gray was throwing curveballs that swerved with a 9.10-inch horizontal break. And that Giancarlo Stanton of the Miami Marlins bashed a ball that left his bat at 120.3 mph. And that a curveball from Collin McHugh of the Houston Astros twirled in with a spin rate of 2,538, far better than the league average of 2,307. You might not be ready to em - brace all those numbers, but start brushing up. Advanced metrics — the source of tired jokes about nerds in their mothers' basements — are a now regular part of major league clubhouses, as common as sunflower seeds and pine tar. "The information that we have available to us is 'everything,'" Giants reliever George Kontos said. "Every pitch is documented: That's any pitcher throwing to any hitter of any game in the major leagues. If there is something that's not available to us in the packets, we can ask for it, and we can have it in 10 minutes." The silly debate over Scouting vs. Stats is over. The answer is unequivocally both. Almost every major league team has some sort of analytics department; no team is shuttering its traditional scout - ing department. Consider the example of the Giants' three World Series championship teams. In advance of every series, coaches provided players with a scouting report that blended the comprehensive observations of a real human with THEGAME