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Sports fans love statistics. Whatever the sport, there are always numbers attached to the games we love. Ardent supporters memorize batting averages and ERA and even advanced sabermetrics, treating the numbers as talismans that can just as easily prove a person’s greatness as create false impressions. But how many memorize and follow their team’s waste diversion rates, or energy usage?

For years not even the teams gave these numbers a second thought. The process of hosting sporting events was simply known to require a lot of electricity, and to produce a lot of trash. It was an afterthought for many franchises, lost in the shuffle as teams focused more on building rosters than building a sustainable legacy within the community.

Having attended the inaugural Green Sports Alliance Summit last weekend, it became increasingly apparent over the three-day event that one of the most critical ways in which teams can come to embrace sustainable initiatives is to embrace statistics beyond those that assist in smart personnel decisions.

So we’re going to take a different twist to the weekly column here and look at a completely different way in which statistical analysis has allowed a baseball team to make sensible decisions that have positive impacts on the bottom line both environmentally and economically and that help drive a positive change in fan behaviors that is rippling all throughout the sport…

Safeco Field, the crown jewel of Pacific Northwest baseball, has been a beacon of inspiration for other major league ballparks as it improves its environmental footprint... AND saves money doing it.

Six years ago, the Seattle Mariners were hardly the model of success when it comes to sustainability. 88 percent of the garbage created by fans and the staff at Safeco Field was heading directly on the back of garbage trucks to landfills. Initial efforts to encourage recycling were, well, discouraging at best.

Scott Jenkins, the vice president of ballpark operations, detailed his team’s program to turn waste production into a productive enterprise which could save the team millions in the long run. In 2006 the Mariners began simply tracking their numbers, pinning down their baseline rates of energy usage and waste diversion.

When the team looked at 2005 data, they discovered that they were burning through 13.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity every season. They were composting just twelve percent of the organic materials that were finding their way into garbage cans around Safeco Field. It was a picture of excess that would discourage many institutions.

But instead of becoming despondent, the Mariners used their tracking system as motivation to improve their environmental footprint. Seeing the numbers allowed the team to make smarter decisions. Some things were as simple as deciding how long to keep on the stadium lights, and having security guards sweep the corridors to shut off lights. They also switched their old incandescent scoreboard to an LED scoreboard that reduced the power drain to a tenth of the previous system’s draw.

To remedy the glut of trash being created, Seattle sought solutions. Some involved installing new recycling and compost stations along with simple signs above them to help educate fans and force them to think about their own impact. The team also switched out all their serviceware with compostable materials at the concession stands around the ballpark. As they watched their diversion rates improve exponentially every year, last year’s successful gains only spurred the desire to do better yet.

By 2007 they had doubled the amount of trash being reclaimed and composted. They had reduced energy use by 1.5 million kilowatt-hours in a year. By the 2011 season, Seattle had streamlined its ballpark operations to the point where they were using less than 10 million kWh a season and diverting 82% of their trash to locally-owned Cedar Grove Composting, which processed 123.75 tons of the 259.47 total tons of refuse produced during the 2010 season. Another 88.8 tons was paper and plastic and commingled recycling. In just six years the team had gone from sending 88% of the trash created at Safeco Field into landfills to a rate seventy percentage points lower.

It continues to be a feel-good story that showcased both the commitment of the Mariners and a growing green initiative blossoming around Major League Baseball. In 2010 the commissioner’s office committed to creating and implementing the Green Track tracking system to collect and analyze data from all thirty teams to create league-wide baseline sustainability standards and help the latecomers to the initiative progress more quickly.

And while it provides a great public-relations story, these two areas of improvement alone — saving energy andhave saved Seattle nearly $1.5 million over the past four years. A 30% reduction in electricity use has saved the Mariners an average of $302,900 per year since the 2008 season — even as commercial electric rates in Seattle have increased 22% during that span.

Smart waste-management decisions have in turn allowed the team to find novel opportunities to connect the fan with the team down to the roots...

By improving their diversion rate, the team has realized reduced waste management savings to the tune of $72,000 from that baseline established five years ago. And in conjunction with Cedar Grove, Seattle has ran several promotional days so far in 2011 where they return that compost back to the fans in Safeco Field Soil giveaways. Increasingly popular among the fan base, it provides another opportunity for the Mariners to close the loop on the food cycle within their ballpark.

A sustainability policy can be quite the competitive advantage in the long run for the team that takes the goal seriously. The Mariners are spending in some cases just a quarter of what some of Major League Baseball’s other franchises are on electricity. They are turning trash into treasure that can then connect the fan with the club more intimately when he takes takes piece of the ballpark home to his or her garden. And the numbers don’t lie, spurring teams to seek improvements in their tracking statistics that mirror their other team operations seamlessly.

That’s the best part — that the moves one team make can spark interest in other teams. In one way it is the mark of a collaborative spirit, one in which Major League Baseball has taken these initiatives and run with them. The league has been working with the Natural Resources Defense Council since 2005, ambitiously partnering with its member teams to clean up the environmental impacts of the game.

Because of initiatives like those in Seattle as well as around the league, the MLB announced last spring that it would become the first sports league in the world to systematically track energy use, waste production, water use and paper procurement among all thirty of its member teams. By sharing the best practices discovered by all of its constituents, the league has aggressively worked to inspire improvements across the country’s ballparks.

But at the same time it will eventually be not just a collaborative effort that leads to the most effective changes in baseball’s sustainability. It will be the statistics.

As teams in the AL West and throughout the league watch teams like Seattle save money and earn public accolades for their efforts, they in turn will be encouraged to one-up their rivals both on the field and in the environmental impact game.

So don’t throw away the old stats. Keep on rethinking the advanced metrics of tomorrow. But recognize also that there are more statistics in a sports franchise’s train of thought than just those that impact personnel decisions or the win-loss column. Some have an even greater bearing on the way our sports impact a society that takes its cues from its favorite teams as well as the environment in which they are played…