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Pitch counts are so entrenched now in today's game that the guys who pile up innings and the counting numbers that come with them are now the pitchers who can work most efficiently – 3.6 pitches per plate appearance or less.

Those inefficient hurlers, mostly high strikeout guys, are more limited in innings because they reach that magic 100-pitch threshold sooner. Earlier this year, Joba Chamberlain(notes) hit his 100-pitch limit while striking out 12 of 14 batters and was promptly removed – in the middle of the sixth inning.

Nolan Ryan, perhaps the most inefficient pitcher ever, is making a valiant stand against the conventional wisdom of pitch counts. The Rangers team president issued a directive banning pitch counts at the major league and all minor league levels.

"These pitchers have been on pitch counts from the time they were in Little League," Ryan says. "A lot of these kids have never completed a nine-inning game. I

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Even the old guard who view the web merely as some spun silk in their backyard have adopted one "new-age" baseball stat: on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS).

Okay, maybe not Harold Reynolds, who audibly groaned on The MLB Network recently at its mere mention. What do you expect from a former Punch-and-Judy middle infielder?

OPS has been widely cited for over a quarter century now. But let's focus here on not what a hitter's OPS actually is, but rather what it should be.

Back in 2005, J.C. Bradbury of HardballTimes.com introduced PrOPS (predicted OPS). He concluded that line drive rate, fly ball ratio and rates of walks, strikeouts, hit-by-pitch and homers could be used to predict a players OPS. An adjustment is also made for the hitter's home park – the more homer-friendly, for example, the higher the PrOPS.

Our friends at Baseball Info Solutions, stat provider to various big league clubs, are the source of the raw data that we plug

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Even before the rapid ascent of fantasy baseball, we loved the combo guys. Not pretzels stuffed with cheese but rather homers and steals from a single source.

Our formula basically is the geometric mean of homers and steals. Got that, Einstein? The numbers don't mean much without really understanding the formula (developed by Bill James). Just trust that you have to do a lot of both to have a good number.

Seven guys in history have scored over 40 for a single season – Alex Rodriguez(notes) (1998), Alfonso Soriano(notes) (2006), Eric Davis (1987 and 1986, in order of combo score), Rickey Henderson (1986), Barry Bonds(notes) (1996 and 1990), Jose Canseco (1988) and Bobby Bonds (1973).

This year, no one is approaching that. But the league leader would have shocked us in March – Arizona's Mark Reynolds(notes) (13 homers, 11 bags). Four more guys are on pace for a 30 combo score – Ian Kinsler(notes), Nelson Cruz(notes), Torii Hunter(notes) and

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You see a lot of new fangled baseball statistics with strange acronyms but Occam's Razor rules here in Baseball by the Numbers. The simplest stats that work are deemed best. So let's go old school like we used to when we were kids and flipped over the baseball cards to see how many batters pitchers punch out and walk.

The K:BB ratio is our focus today. The line of demarcation separating the dominant enough from the dominant challenged is two Ks for every walk. Through Memorial Day, 52 pitchers met our threshold. The eligibility requirement is one inning for each game, so relievers are out (we don't have nearly enough data yet to fairly evaluate them).

Most of these guys are really good and thus highly valued. That's what we'd expect if the stat has merit. But there are some who have relatively low perceived value who not only are on the list, but high on it. And, similarly, some pitchers who are perceived to be very solid

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Home runs are a source of awe and wonder and, yes, suspicion. It's not just the guys who are flashing surprising power who are raising eyebrows, but also those who suddenly now seem smaller than life.

With the season still in its adolescence, let's make the numbers bigger and more meaningful by looking at the major components of the home run – the rate of fly balls and the frequency with which guys are knocking them over the wall. Comparing these numbers to what a player has done in the past enables us to better predict which hitters should be expected to continue or reverse current long-ball trends.

The league homer totals are right in line with the recent, post-steroid-testing past and well below the rates of those carefree summers back at the beginning of the decade. Major league teams are currently on a 166-homer pace (163 in '08 and 165 in '07), a far cry from the 190 homers teams averaged back in 2000.

Currently, major

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One of the great baseball debates involves clutch hitting: Does it exist or is it the game's mythical unicorn?

In 1977, Dick Cramer wrote a Baseball Research Journal article that said that year-to-year averages of players with runners in scoring position (RISP) appeared random and thus clutch hitting did not exist. But about 30 years later, Bill James wrote that Cramer's methodology "was unreliable to the point of being useless." Basically, James said he finally realized that he and Cramer were using random data to prove randomness. And that while this can prove that there's no evidence of something, it cannot prove that something does not exist.

James says clutch hitting is now an open issue and I will not argue the point. But he's accepting implicitly that the sample sizes for even an entire season's worth of RISP data is too small and thus random. And random things are very unstable and more likely to change dramatically.

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The best check on overall hurler stats right now is Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), which measures only things that a pitcher is inarguably responsible for – homers, hit batters, walks and Ks.

With the help of the Hardball Times, let's spot the outliers – those most lucky and unlucky in having their ERAs impacted by the defense behind them. We focus on starters now because the samples are too small for relievers.

It's not enough to recalculate ERAs so they are FIP-free. To better inform our recommendations, let's also look at K:BB ratio (we want at least twice as many K's as walks), line-drive rates (75 percent of those are hits regardless of defense) and rate of homers on fly balls (it should be about 10.5 percent).

We boldly go where the numbers tell us. To better understand our recommendations, "Buy" means our stats analysis predicts the pitcher is likely to perform significantly better, "Hold" means to expect

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One of the great baseball books is "Nine Innings" by Dan Okrent, coincidentally the inventor of fantasy baseball. Okrent uses a lazy, early-season contest between the Brewers and Orioles in 1982 as a jumping off point for a bevy of entertaining stories on the intricacies of our most complex game.

As we put the first month of 2009 into the books, I figured we could take a page, literally, from "Nine Innings" and look at the season to-date through the prism of one day. What stories have been told by the numbers in Monday's box scores and what do they foretell?

Let's do away with the "Buy, Hold, Sell" format for this week and take a leisurely stroll through Monday night's action.

Emilio Bonifacio, 2B, Marlins: He's down to .266 now after a 1-for-5 night. He K'ed again and didn't walk, making those ratios 20 Ks and four walks for the year, and has stolen two bags since opening day. Bonifacio skepticism was such a lay up that I