The battle has already been lost. In fact, let’s face it: Few battles have ever been more lost than the one I’m about to wage. But baseball has a naming problem. Well, two naming problems, if you want to include the travesty that is (another) Fifth Third Park, but in this case we’re addressing a patch of territory abandoned by the written language to the cold lifeless realm of mathematics.

Some numbers can make the heart sing—100 on the radar gun still means something, even as the 95-and-a-slider guys become 97-and-a-slider. We put emphasis on round numbers to serve as milestones, 3,000 hits and 300—I mean, 100—wins. But it takes a lot of work to turn a number into a feeling, and ironically, a lot of words. Not every set of digits can pull it off. Few of us, at least so far, can feel an emotional reaction to an exit velocity reading, or an IVB. The debates surrounding these metrics usually run along reactionary lines, and that isn’t the goal here: Some of those numbers will build into themselves a patina of connotation over time. Broadcasts will be able to lay down a 110 EV90 the way they do an ERA.

Nor is this to say that the numbers aren’t important. We owe baseball’s history to Alexander Cartwright for framing the sport in numbers: the numbers are our fossils. They make the past real and connected in a way that other sports, so fundamentally transformed by their flying wedges and chest passes before the age of video recording, can never share. But there is one system of quantification, a century old now, that has never quite done the job it was assigned. As long as there have been out-of-the-park home runs—we’ll excuse Ross Barnes and his fair-foul bunts rolling under benches in play—there have been home run distances, listed with the same figures we use today. They’ve never felt quite right. Those old figures smack of exaggeration bordering on desperation, of mythology wearing modern clothes, using numbers to legitimize fish stories. Many of them are. But that truth hides the fact that perhaps numbers were never right for the job at all.