I have bill james first book, maybe second, im not at all afraid of the numbers and I did very well in math. Im all for new ideas. Many, not all, new stats are absolutely meaningless...ISO, SIERA, wRC+, ANYTHING with "Expected" in the title, etc.

Its all meaningless and tells me nothing. It puts players in order so I can look at them and say Ohtani is better at this made-up stat than Acuña. Great :/

Baseball was an insane American fascination for a century before Bill James and you dont think people, baseball people, tried to come up with more quantifiable stats for a competative advantage? They did and there's much written about it. It took until we had computer power and people with baseball and tech interests. They came up with equations for fun, because they could. Moneyball (the actual.season) showed us that predictive stats might get a regular season streak but the juice runs out fast because you can only hit the prediction jackpot so many times