How often do you look up statistics?

As a kid, I remember flipping to the Kansas City Star’s sport page on Sunday and looking at the baseball statistics. It didn’t have every stat, but it had Royals stats, and it had league leaders in varying categories—strikeouts, innings pitched, home runs, batting average, and the like. I remember seeing Mike Sweeney’s batting average near the top of the list in 2002, and I remember watching Randy Johnson’s strikeout numbers balloon at the top of the leaderboard that same year.

It was, at the time, one of the best and only ways to see statistics for the season. Nowadays, though, times have changed. The internet’s ubiquity has led to sites like ESPN and MLB.com to list statistics, yes, but also to third-party sites like Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference that offer nearly every statistic possible in easy-to-consume tables of data.

In my years at Royals Review, I’ve pulled up statistics websites more times than I can reasonably count. On my Firefox bookmarks toolbar, I have links to the current year’s Royals page on Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference, and it’s always one of the best days of the year when I can finally update them from the previous year to the current year.

But I know that not everyone is a compulsive statistic looker-upper like I am, and I know that most of you don’t ever need to look up statistics in order to complete a blog that you’re working on for thousands of people to read. And so I have a question (attached to the bottom in a poll): how often do you look up statistics?

In the comments, I’d also like to hear from you more detail about your statistics usage or non-usage. Not only will it help us figure out how to continue offering the best reading experience and information possible, but it’ll help us understand and keep in mind how our readers experience the game.