WHIPPED: Unable to Keep Up with Baseball's Statistical Refinements

       Baseball statistics have gone out of their mind.  A recent one is the WHIP.   But I was unable to remember its meaning.  A newspaper article today pegged it down.  A pitcher had a 1.58 WHIP:  in other words, a little over 1 1/2 "walks and hits per innings pitched."

       So it's how many blokes are getting on base one way or another due to your failed pitching.  It has a point; you certainly want a good WHIP whether it's something on your fastball or in your stats.

       But the main reason I have to give it a pass as the seventy-fifth-thousand-and-third kind of statistic in baseball is there's some small virtue in the near rhyme and ALterNAting RHYTHm in the WHIP:

          WALKS and HITS
          per INNings PITCHED

       I can roll with that.  Plus the snappy acronym.