Stop me if this sounds familiar. You have a question about baseball, the sort of thing that should be answerable with stats, you think. So you go looking for the stat, but you can't find anyone who computes it the way you want. So you find a site that (maybe) has the raw data you need, copy and paste it into Excel, and bang out a few formulas until you get a result. And all along the way, you've thought: There has to be a better way.
I'm here to tell you that in fact there is—the relational database.