Matthew 5:37: “All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

I don’t know if you’ve heard what Mark Twain said about lies and statistics, but it’s something I can’t repeat in its totality here, so if you don’t know, ask a bass. They’ll tell you.

Anyhow, I was thinking about statistics since, as you know, I love baseball although sometimes it seems the game is more about statistics than anything else. I think we are all familiar with measures such as batting average, runs batted in, or earned runs, and know that these figures are all measures of how well a player is doing. But did you know that in all, there are about 130 statistics that are kept in baseball, many of which most fans have never heard of? For example, there is the EQA or the equivalent average, which measures a player’s batting average not counting park and league factors, whatever those might be. Then there’s the FPOM or the first pitch outs made, which counts the number of outs earned when the batter ground or flies out on the first pitch. And finally, there’s the VORP, the value over replacement player, which calculates a player’s overall value in comparison to a “replacement-level” player.

Other sports have their statistics as well, but I was thinking that we also have them in choir. If you figure that we give two and a half hours a week for say 50 weeks a year (including special services and rehearsals), higher math tells us that is 125 hours a year. If you’ve been in choir for, say, 50 years (I’m not naming any names here), that works out to 7600 hours total, or about 950 work days, or around six months. Now of course, the time that professional athletes put in is for their job. It is not our “job” to sing or rehearse. We do it out of a sense of gratitude and thanksgiving to God, who created us, who created music, and who fit us for fellowship, growth and praise. And it was God who saved us from our sins through the death of Jesus Christ, our Savior. And that single sacrifice is the most important statistic of all. Amen.