T<strong>hursday morning.</strong></p><p>Brian Bannister feels nervous over breakfast. And when Bannister feels nervous, he goes to the numbers. In rough times, he has always found comfort in numbers.</p><p>&#8220;Look at my xFIP,&#8221; he is saying as he pulls out a few pages he printed off the Internet site, &#8220;The Hardball Times.&#8221; He points out his xFIP &#8212; an advanced pitching statistic that stands for &#8220;Expected Fielding Independent Pitching.&#8221; The statistic calculates something that looks like ERA, only instead of measuring earned runs per nine innings, it measures three things that pitchers can control &#8212; strikeouts, walks and home runs allowed. According to the glossary, xFIP should take out a lot of noise of ERA. It promises to help you understand how well a pitcher pitched.</p><p>That&#8217;s good. At the moment &#8212; it is Thursday morning, just 36 hours before what might be the most important start of Brian Bannister&#8217;s still budding career &#8212; he is dying to understand what the heck has happened to him.</p><p>&#8220;Look,&#8221; he says, and here is his row of xFIP numbers:</p><p>2006: 6.29.</p><p>2007: 5.14.</p><p>2008: 4.59.</p><p>&#8220;Look at that,&#8221; he says again. &#8220;I&#8217;m actually pitching better than I was last year. My xFIP is down. It&#8217;s just that I got lucky last year.&#8221;</p><p>Then he stares at the numbers for another few seconds, and he offers a frustrated smile because he knows that, in the end, nobody else really cares about his xFIP. Nobody else really cares about his skyrocketing Left on Base Percentage. All anyone cares about is that he&#8217;s getting lit up. He&#8217;s giving up many more runs than he gave up last year. And Bannister knows that despite all his analysis and study, in this crazy pitching game, it really might be better to be lucky than good.</p><p>&#8226;&#8226;&#8226;</p><p><strong>Thursday night, less than 24 hours before his start</strong>.</p><p>Bannister isn&#8217;t sleeping all that well. He knows that he&#8217;s a three-run homer away from Omaha. And he and his wife, Megan, are expecting their first child in a couple of months. There&#8217;s too much to think about.</p><p>Brian has never kidded himself about this game. He grew up around baseball, of course. His father, Floyd, was a college legend and the first pick in the amateur draft. He pitched in the big leagues for 15 years. Brian never had it made like his Dad. Brian was a college walk-on. He was taken in the seventh round by the New York Mets. His fastball made scouts yawn. He got traded before his rookie season for a guy who could throw 100 mph. He began his rookie year in the minor leagues.</p><p>Then, finally, he made it to the Kansas City Royals. And he was a revelation. He used advanced statistical measures, and he threw strikes, and he challenged hitters, and nobody seemed able to get good wood on the ball against him. With three weeks left in the season, Bannister seemed to have a very real chance to be named rookie of the year. And even though he struggled those last three weeks, he still finished 12-9 with a 3.87 ERA, an excellent year. This year, at the start, he was just about unhittable. He began the year 3-0 with an 0.86 ERA.</p><p>Things have been miserable since then. The last three months he has been getting battered. His ERA is 6.64 since April 30. His last three starts, his ERA is almost 10. Bannister knows that ERA is a terrible way to measure a pitcher&#8217;s true performance. There are countless uncontrollable factors that go into how many runs a pitcher gives up &#8212; luck, the quality of defense, the ballpark dimensions, the size of the umpire&#8217;s strike zone that day. He understands that lies and tricks hide in the numbers &#8212; he scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of his SAT.