Tom Tango, one of Toronto's offseason additions, is a self-taught expert in the science of baseball statistics (referred to as sabermetrics), which is gaining authoritative influence in front offices and on the field. "There's nobody better than (Tango) in the world," said Wayne Winston, a professor of decision sciences at Indiana University and author of Mathletics. "He's a genius. He knows everything about baseball. I think he'll help (the Jays) a lot to make better decisions." Consider the Seattle Mariners had 61 wins in the 2008 season before the team hired Tango as a statistical consultant. Last season, wins jumped 24 games to 85. "The best you can say is that everyone involved had some value-added and that's the extent of quantifying my contributions," said Tango. Roughly two-thirds of baseball clubs have someone like Tango crunching numbers to determine the optimal decision in specific situations. Co-author of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, the 40-something Tango is a trained computer programmer and analyst who took on baseball stats as a side job six years ago. "Reading Bill James and (sabermetrics pioneer and author of The Hidden Game of Baseball) Pete Palmer was the trigger moment for me, and most people my age," Tango says.