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13 BAY AREA NEWS GROUP PLAYBALL THEGAME dictates. "You have to pick and choose what stats you are going to look at," Posey said. "I think it's great. I think it's very beneficial. But at the same time, you have to use your instincts." THISISASTATISTICAL evolution, not a revolution. Stats are as interwoven with the game as the stitches on a baseball. The writer Alan Schwarz opens his book "The Numbers Game" about the history of baseball stats with a box score from 1858. He also recounts the story of Allan Roth, the first full-time statistician ever hired by a major league club. Branch Rickey hired Roth after the 1947 season. And it was Roth who helped persuade the Brooklyn Dodgers to trade Dixie Walker, even though the right fielder hit .306. Why? Roth had kept diagrams of where each batter's hits went — the first "spray chart" — and noticed that Walker was no longer pulling the ball, a sign that his bat speed was trending downward. (Yep: Walker was out of the league two years later.) "Baseball is a game of percentages," Roth once explained. "I try to find the actual percentage." The timeline is filled with lu - minaries from Bill James to John Dewan to Rob Neyer and Brian Kenny. And, for the younger genera - tion, there is Brad Pitt. "'Moneyball' was the mo- ment," said Sam Miller, the edi- tor-in-chief of Baseball Prospec- tus. "Before that, there were smart guys who knew each other on the Internet. But that was about it. And they clearly felt like an outsider culture." In his book "Moneyball," writer Michael Lewis chronicled how Beane used statistical analysis to help make the small-payroll A's a regular-season powerhouse. The book came out in 2003 and the movie, starring Pitt, in 2011. "After 'Moneyball,' there was a huge boom in business at Baseball Prospectus, and there was a huge change in the prestige and in the number of people who identified as fans of sabermetrics," said Mill - er, who lives in San Carlos. It was a movement that launched a thousand WHIPs (walks plus hits per innings pitched). After "Moneyball," more and more fans started to look at stats to win their fantasy leagues, CanIgetyournumber? Thealphabetsoupofmodernmetricsmakes it hard to know what a player might value. So we put the question to some Giants this spring: What numbers matter to you? BRANDONBELT,FIRSTBASEMAN Battingaverageonballsputinplay. "That tells me a lot. If my BABIP is good, I feel like I'm having a lot of line drives. That's important for me. If I can have a lot of line drives, especially in our park, I'm going to be more successful than not." GEORGEKONTOS,RELIEVER Inheritedrunnersscoredpercentage. "It's a big one for any reliever. You want to come in the game, and you want to leave those guys on base." KELBYTOMLINSON,UTILITYPLAYER Nothing. "Stats are helpful, but a lot of times they don't show a lot of what players do to help win a game. That's ultimately what you're trying to do — to win as many games as possible. I don't think there's one stat out there that accurately portrays how valuable a player can be." JOSHOSICH,LEFT-HANDEDRELIEVER Holds. "I don't really look at stats. But when you go out there — even if you give up a run — you're out there to keep the lead. As long as you keep your lead, you've done the job." GREGORBLANCO,OUTFIELDER Runs. "Runs. Runs. Runs. Because they represent the kind of player I should be — I don't worry about average too much. I just worry about runs and stolen bases. I just need to be on base and score runs." ROBERTOKELLY,THIRDBASECOACH Theoldones. "RBIs, home runs and average. Those are the only ones we had. We didn't have WAR. We didn't have OPS+. A player comes to bat now, and they show his WAR, his WAR-plus and his WAR-minus. … I played the game for a long time, and those are stats I don't understand. I'm looking at it and thinking, 'What does that mean?'" realizing that traditional stats such as RBIs were often deceptive measures of a player's value. But as a measure of how rapidly things are changing, Miller points to how quaint even "Moneyball" looks by comparison. Beane's most memorable coup in those days? He recognized the under-market value of on-base percentage. "What Billy Beane was doing was supposedly radical and rev - olutionary," Miller said. "And he had access to probably less data than you can pull up on your cell- phone in the next 30 seconds." DBROWN@MERCURYNEWS.COM RogerAngell's baseball essays were featured in The New Yorker. ASSOCIATED PRESS; OPENING SPREAD: NHAT V. MEYER