Baseball and American sports in general are a bit of an exception though. Most sports are much more difficult to evaluate statistically. For example in chess the elo ranking offer good prediction of average performances but fails totally to evaluate 1) head-to-head win rate, 2) one-game results or even tournaments results, 3) relative strength on different parts of the game (for example “who is good at opening preparation ?” is typically answered by the same sort of heuristics as “who is good at maths” or “who is good at psychology ?”.
Baseball and American sports in general are a bit of an exception though. Most sports are much more difficult to evaluate statistically. For example in chess the elo ranking offer good prediction of average performances but fails totally to evaluate 1) head-to-head win rate, 2) one-game results or even tournaments results, 3) relative strength on different parts of the game (for example “who is good at opening preparation ?” is typically answered by the same sort of heuristics as “who is good at maths” or “who is good at psychology ?”.