I used to play SSI’s Computer Baseball on the Apple II, way back when.  It was stats-based instead of being an arcade-ish game; you were in charge of strategy, not swinging the bat.  You could set things like running strategy (conservative, normal, or aggressive), infield depth, and so on.

You could also put in the stats for your favorite team and play them against whoever you liked.  (It only came with a smattering of “all-time great” teams, but of course you could type in others.)  The game would calculate ability based on the stats, but it really didn’t understand sample size.  It also didn’t keep track of stats based on game results, so after every game you had to manually update the stats.

Of course, since it didn’t understand sample sizes, one or two lucky games could profoundly affect long-term performance.  You have no idea how many batting titles Thad Bosley won on my Cubs team.  (He hit .418 one year!)

I’m sorry; what were we talking about again?

Footballoutsiders.com has dome some good work with respect to objective analysis, but it’s clearly not nearly as mature as baseball analysis is.