Charles Steinberg remembers exactly when Earl Weaver began recording statistics to help him win games as manager of the Baltimore Orioles. “July 11, 1968, the day he became the manager,” said Steinberg, then a summer assistant with the Orioles, now an executive vice president with the Boston Red Sox.

“There were patterns he had observed in the minor leagues where if you recorded the numbers, those patterns might be recorded in a mathematical way. He asked Bob Brown” – the club’s public relations director – “to record every at-bat hitter vs. pitcher.”

Nearly half a century later, Weaver’s method of compiling and using statistics may seem primitive, but he was a pioneer; he was unique, years ahead of his time in the use of statistics to help him win games. But Steinberg was quick to emphasize an important element of Weaver’s use of statistics.

“He used the numbers to support what he believed,” Steinberg said in a telephone interview last week. “He was a master of the statistics, not a slave to the statistics.”

Tony La Russa, whose managerial career overlapped Weaver’s, offered a similar caveat about …

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Readers write, and occasionally club owners and club executives write. Today is a time to look at e-mail comments from an owner and an executive.

The owner is Jim Crane of the Houston Astros. He didn’t care for a recent column about Major League Baseball’s minority hiring practices. The column wasn’t about Crane, but it featured him because he hired Bo Porter, an African-American, as the Astros’ manager and fired him before he was able to complete his second season even though the team was headed for its best won-lost record and division standing in four years.

Crane especially took exception to what I wrote about his alleged reputation in …

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Hear ye! hear ye! hear ye! Barry Bonds deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, and he shall be elected to the Hall of Fame.

Who makes such a proclamation? Why none other than Bonds himself.

In a typically arrogant and self-serving interview with an MLB.com reporter who has long been a Bonds sycophant, Bonds said:

“I love Major League Baseball. I always have and I loved playing the game. I don’t have any doubts that I’ll get there in time. I’m bothered about it, but I don’t sit here going, ‘I’m not going to make it.’ I don’t see how it stays the way it’s going. In my mind, in my head, I’m a lot more positive about it than I am negative. I think eventually they’ll do the right thing.”

And he said:

“I deserve to be there. Clemens deserves to be there. The guys that are supposed to be there are supposed to be there. Period. I don’t even know how to say it. We are Hall of Famers. Why are we having these conversations about it? Why are we talking about …

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