of numbers and statistics

reading a book called Moneyball which talks about Baseball and picking drafts and stuff like that. Came across this really nice paragraph on how and what numbers reveal.

"James later reduced his complaint to a sentence : fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers is what interested him. Words, and the meaning that they were designed to convey. "When the numbers acquire the significance of language," he later wrote, "they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry. ... And it is not just baseball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror describe. It is character, It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is discipline. And it is victory and defeat, which is all that the idiot sub-conscious really understands." "

In my opinion, atleast this is what we expect numbers to reveal. I am not completely sure if they always reveal the complete story.