Now with analytics, the game is even more involved with numbers. The statistics that are included for the Lutheran Baseball Records reflect the performances of players and do provide some basis for comparison. Though statistics have relevance to a player and team, the main statistic is wins and losses. We won a lot of games!

A major positive about the Lutheran Baseball Records is consistency. Players had consistent schedules with competitive opponents, were coached in a consistent manner, scorekeeping was done similarly, and games were played on a consistent group of baseball diamonds.

I did go back into Lutheran Baseball history several years before 2005 and included players and their numbers if they ranked among the leaders of the categories. As I coached against many of those players when I was at Manual High School, I was comfortable with their inclusion.

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Some variations that are reflected in the statistics and records are:
1) Bats
2) Pitch Counts
The bats used from 2005 to 2012 had more “juice” in them. The -3 Bats were
introduced to make bats more similar to wood bats. Introducing a Pitch Count in 2017 by the IHSAA made pitching appearances more restrictive for a pitcher, primarily for days of rest between appearances depending on the number of pitches thrown. This rule made scheduling of pitchers much more strategic, particularly for smaller schools. It was not unusual to have to take a pitcher out due to the increments of the pitch count so that we would have pitchers available for the next game(s). The Pitch Count impacted decisions of how long a pitcher could stay in a game, depending on the inning, score and upcoming schedule. I know that there were games we lost due to not having pitchers available to pitch when under the previous pitching rules, we would have been OK.