There's only one meaningful stat in sports

If I were to ask you to draw a conclusion from the following stats of Thursday’s softball game between Annville-Cleona and Pequea Valley, what would you hypothesize?

Pequea Valley pitcher Amanda Houck struck out 10 batters, gave up a mere three hits and only walked three.

Annville-Cleona pitcher Christi Lerchen only struck out two batters, gave up six hits and also walked three.

Pequea Valley had five extra base hits including two triples.

Annville-Cleona didn’t have any extra base hits and only Darian Brenner post multiple hits for the Dutchman.

If you guessed that Pequea Valley was victorious, you’d be dead wrong.  Annville-Cleona defeated Pequea Valley, 4-1 and caused a tie for first place in section four.

Thursday’s game proved that at the end of the day, there’s only one statistic that really matters; wins.

Throughout the course of a game, there are many things that aren’t recorded or taken in consideration that have a great impact on the game. All of Pequea Valley’s extra base hits came when no one was on base and the Braves were consistently unable to capitalize.

“They did hit the ball but they hit it at the right time for us; when there was nobody on base,” Annville-Cleona coach Dave Bentz said.

The fact that the Braves couldn’t hit the ball is key situations didn’t escape the minds of their coaching staff.

“We’ve struggled all year on capitalizing on hits and it’s just another scenario where we get hits but we scatter them and they aren’t together,” Pequea Valley coach Amy Shay said.

The Dutchmen however, took advantage of two Braves errors, got some timely hits and drew two of Houck’s three walks all in the third inning to score all four of their runs.

“A key hit, good eyes at the plate and a couple kind of put them back on their heels a bit,” Dave Bentz said.

As far as stat books go, I guess you can’t believe everything you read.