Forget tonight’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. For statistics junkies, the real action takes place Wednesday at the Symposium on Statistics and Operations Research in Baseball, at California State University-East Bay. Academics and baseball analysts will spend the day poring over stats from the first half of the season in hopes of predicting the outcome of the last.

Mitch Watnik, an assistant professor of statistics and baseball fantasy-league blogger who organized the event, credits the Great American Pastime for his own career path. “I got into statistics because I was into baseball,” he says. “I eventually had to learn some theory.” And statistical theory, he says, is becoming an increasingly important part of major-league sports, as teams try to get an edge on the competition.

If you should miss the symposium, not to worry: It will be broadcast this week on MLB.com’s Fantasy 411. —Don Troop