Baseball is a game of small pleasures, and for me, one of the biggest is indeed one of the smallest. Every summer I visit my wife’s grandparents’ house in Galesburg, Ill. Nestled right into that part of Illinois where there are about as many Cardinals fans as Cubs fans, Galesburg has Internet connectivity, but it’s just enough of a pain that I usually end up leaving my laptop alone and following the box scores in the Galesburg Register-Mail, a wonderful paper just Midwestern enough to run leaderboards for nothing more modern than batting average, home runs, RBI, stolen bases, runs scored, ERA, and winning percentage. It’s a joy.

These days, when even the most self-consciously old school fan is not only aware of the value of OPS as an index of batting prowess, but finds it printed in the daily paper, and when most moderately serious fans are at least aware of more complicated measures like win shares, Value Over Replacement Player, Defense Independent Pitching Statistics, win percentage added, and the like, the hardcore baseball addict can end up with a problem – there are too many statistics, and they all become meaningless.

Most of these uberstatistics have their advantages, and all can add immensely to one’s knowledge and enjoyment of the game, but all suffer from the same problem, which is that they are designed to do the impossible: sum up large, irreducibly complicated parts of the game into a single number. VORP may have its advantages and disadvantages over win shares and OPS, but the majority of the time these numbers are going to tell us nothing we don’t already know – Miguel Cabrera and David Wright are very good, and Neifi Perez and Tony Womack are very bad – and, further, they’re going to tell us what we already know in a not particularly descriptive way. After a while, they become a kind of slurry, and the sports section of the Register-Mail becomes a great relief.

All of which is why these days, the advanced statistics I’m most taken by are merely descriptive. At the hardballtimes.com Web site, for instance, you can find one of the greatest things to happen to the game sincebaseballreference.com- a simple leaderboard that tracks line drive percentage, flyball-to-groundball ratio, and other seemingly abstruse but humble statistics.

It’s moderately interesting to know that Albert Pujols, Lance Berkman, Bobby Abreu, David Wright, and Jim Thome are leading baseball in offensive win shares, but it’s really interesting that Cory Sullivan, Freddy Sanchez, Abreu, Nick Johnson, and Nomar Garciaparra are leading in line drive percentage. Cory Sullivan is hitting more frozen ropes than anyone in baseball? That just doesn’t show up on the back of a Topps card.

Poking around the same leaderboard, you can find a vivid description of how amazing a season Minnesota’s Joe Mauer is having. Any time a 23-year-old catcher is hitting .392, you know he’s doing all right, but did you know that his average on balls in play is .422? Last year’s leader, Miguel Cabrera, was at .363 (this year he’s second in baseball, at .391); in 2004, when Ichiro Suzuki set a new record for safeties, he was at .401. The American League as a whole is at .304.Truth told, I’m not even certain whether the batting average or the average on balls in play is a better expression of how freakishly well Mauer is hitting the ball.

The reason these statistics are so compelling (and I’d urge you to take a look at them yourself; there’s quite a lot of fascinating information) is that they use modern information technology not to assess value, but simply to describe. The question of how good a player is always an interesting one, and in most ways the most basic bit of information we want out of a statistic, which is why new ones seem always to focus on how good a player is overall rather than how good he is at some particular and discreet thing like running the bases.

The oldest and still most evocative stats, though, don’t assess value but simply describe things that actually happen on the field: How often a player gets a hit, how often he drives a run in, etc. Flawed as batting average and runs batted in are, their enduring popularity has less to do with people’s stubbornness than with the fact that they’re recognizably tethered to the game we watch.

With that in mind, the next wave of baseball analysis is going to be based not on ever-more complicated ways of parsing the difference in gross production between Cabrera and Wright, but on describing how their equally valuable offense takes expression on the field. If Wright hits more line drives, but Cabrera’s balls find the holes more often, isn’t that worth knowing? It gives expression to something we see but might find difficult to prove in the absence of evidence – which is, after all, the most basic function of baseball statistics.

When reading the full list of qualified batters’ averages in the Sunday paper in Galesburg, you’re taking in proof that events have happened, and a kind of description of them. It’s hard to think of a better use to which numbers can be put.

tmarchman@nysun.com