UC Davis Scientists Learn How To Hit Home Runs

Engineers at UC Davis have just learned how to hit the long ball. In a study just published in the American Journal of Physics, these scientists developed “improved models for the pitch, batting, and post-impact flight phases of a baseball [for use in] an optimal control context to find bat swing parameters that produce maximum range.” There is lots of scary math and physics in this paper, but their most surprising conclusion is that an optimally hit curve ball will travel farther than a fastball, due to the initial topspin from the pitch. And hitting coaches can now tell their clientele that the optimal way to hit a fastball is to undercut it by 2.65 cm and swing upwards at an angle of 0.1594 radians. I’m sure that will help.

Baseball’s Paleontologist

We’re still celebrating the defeat of the New York Yankees here, and remain convinced that the only people who have any business rooting for the Yankees are those that actually grew up in New York. As the saying goes, rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft.

One famous Yankee fan who did grow up in New York was Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and prolific writer who died a little over a year ago. I just finished reading Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball, which is a collection of his many pieces on baseball. I was happy to see this collection come out, which he left as a neatly organized manuscript before he died.

Gould grew up in Queens in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s, which was a golden time and place for baseball. There were three teams in town then: the New York Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants. Loyalties were quite divided depending upon the borough, but almost every boy and a good many girls were fanatical about baseball there and then. Gould rooted for the Yankees, and secondarily for the Giants. Of his intellectual attraction to baseball, Gould saw this as a contingent fact of his upbringing, and not of any inherent quality of baseball itself. (For a 1950’s childhood baseball memoir from the opposite side of town, see Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Wait Till Next Year. She was a Dodgers fan, and was heartbroken when the team left for Los Angeles in 1958, along with the Giants, who moved to San Francisco.)

I think the most analytic piece in the collection is the essay “Why no one hits .400 anymore”. The last batter to have a batting average over .400 was Ted Williams in 1941. Gould explains the absence of .400 batters these days as an outcome of the long-term trend towards there being much less variation in the quality of major-league baseball players.

Gould was a Yankees fan who held season tickets to the Red Sox, and had dual loyalties to both teams. Though he hated the introduction of wild-card teams to the playoffs (a change starting in 1995), he did see the Red Sox meet the Yankees once in post-season play in 1999, and I suspect he would have been thrilled to see the 2003 matchup as well—baseball at its finest, though the ghosts haunted the Red Sox in the end.

No ghosts appeared Saturday night though: I guess they forgot the game was on, and didn’t appear in time to rescue the Yankees.

All Tied Up

Despite running into trouble in the top of the 9th inning, the Florida Marlins won tonight’s World Series game 4-3 with an Alex Gonzalez home run in the bottom of the 12th. This was pitcher Roger Clemens’ last start of his career, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he puts in a relief appearance in game 6 or 7 back in New York. The series is now even up at two games apiece for the Marlins and the Yankees, with one more game to be played in Florida before the series heads back to New York.

Dave Barry meanwhile has an illuminating column about the return of the World Series to Pro Player Stadium in Florida, the “first major stadium ever constructed entirely from recycled Legos.”

Playoffs Haiku

I wrote the following two years ago after the AL playoffs. It seems appropriate now.

In-Flight Entertainment

On my trip back east, I discovered one thing I like about flying United—that if you turn to channel 9 of the in-flight audio system, they often pipe in the primary transceiver from the flight deck. It’s neat to hear ground saying “United 701, turn to heading 210” “210, United 701” and watch the plane start turning. But they can also pipe other radio signals, and on the flight out they put on the Cubs game straight from the Chicago radio station WGN.

On my return trip yesterday I changed flights in Denver, and waiting for the next plane, I wandered over to watch the Cubs in the terminal bar and grill. Mark Prior was pitching an excellent game, and the Cubs were up 1-nothing, which became 2-nothing after a Dontrelle Willis wild pitch. All was looking bright, and the Cubbies were six outs away from their first pennant in 58 years, at which point I left to catch my plane.

Once aboard, I tried to see if they were broadcasting the game like they did earlier over channel 9. I couldn’t get any audio feed at first, due to a faulty headset plug, but 45 minutes later I got the thing to work, and tuned into a cockpit-ground conversation where the controllers on the ground were saying the Marlins won 8-3—they scored 8 runs in the 8th. Oh god, I thought. The poor Cubs.

And as we now know the Cubs would lose the series in today’s 7th game. It’s a sad day. And channel 9 notwithstanding, I still prefer flying Southwest to United.

Peace, Love, and Baseball

I was out this evening at a meeting planning the Peace Picnic which is part of the Campus Community Book Project, so I missed the Red Sox/Yankees game. I got home to two voice mails, both informing me of a Red Sox win. I’m so glad I’m being taken care of so well by Numenius and Doc Rock!

Fracas At Fenway

Yesterday’s key playoff matchup featuring pitching aces Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens between the Boston Red Sox and the NY Yankees turned much uglier than expected. Both pitchers threw intentionally well inside at the opposing batter, resulting in two skirmishes on the field of play, and the septuaginarian coach for the Yankees, Don Zimmer, being knocked down after he charged Martinez. To top that all off, two Yankees players may end up being charged with assault and battery after they tangled with an overexuberant groundskeeper in the Yankees bullpen. Not a good showing for either team—one wonders how they’ll make it through the rest of the series intact. The Red Sox lost 4-3, putting them much in the hole.

Down south, the Chicago Cubs seem well on their way to the World Series, beating the Florida Marlins at home 8-3 and now being within one game of the playoff series win.

I’m off on a two-day trip to Baltimore to meet with some frighteningly bright computer scientists. This will play havoc with following the playoffs, alas.

Playoff Ordeals

Everything was peachy the first day of the playoffs, with the Giants winning, the Cubs winning, and the Yankees losing, but it has gone downhill since then. The SF Giants were the first team eliminated from the playoffs today, they losing three in a row to the Florida Marlins. The Yankees have taken the next two games from the Minnesota Twins, and are now poised to win the series tomorrow. The Cubs will play the Atlanta Braves in the deciding game of their series.

Meanwhile the Red Sox in a heartbreaking duel lost their opening game with Oakland in the 12th inning, and lost the second game as well, never threatening. Both teams are hitting very poorly, the A’s pitching successfully containing the Red Sox’s powerful lineup. The Red Sox managed to stay alive in tonight’s game, winning it in the bottom of the 11th with a two-run home run from Trot Nixon. It was a very bizarre game, with 6 errors between the two teams, and baserunning snafus by the A’s, including one where Miguel Tejada of the A’s was running from 2nd to 3rd, got obstructed by the Red Sox’s third baseman, ran around third, then stopped between third and home figuring he’d be awarded home anyway after the obstruction. Or something like that. Confusion reigned at that point. He was tagged by the catcher, and the umpiring crew ruled him out, since he should have kept running to home.

The poor Giants. It’s a sad day in Giantsland. The Red Sox avoided the sweep today, but they have to win the next two in a row, so they have their work cut out for them. It might help if their sluggers were to start hitting.

End Of Season

Today was the last game of the regular baseball season. The one game I followed was the Detroit Tigers-Minnesota Twins matchup: the Tigers won, thus avoiding the ignominy of tying the 1962 Mets’ record of losing 120 games in a season. The downside of their sudden winning ways—they just took 3 games out of 4 from the Twins—is the fear that the Twins won’t be up to their forthcoming duty to eliminate the Yankees from the playoffs.

The playoffs look to be quite exciting. All three of the teams we root for—the San Francisco Giants, the Boston Red Sox, and the Oakland A’s—made the playoffs. Alas, at most two of them will make it past the first round since the A’s play the Red Sox right away. Then there’s the Cubbies factor. The Chicago Cubs swept yesterday’s doubleheader with the Pirates to win their division. I was pleased by this event; Pica less so, since this sets up the possibility of a Cubs-Red Sox World Series. Since the Red Sox last won the Series in 1918, and the Cubs in 1908, heartbreak is inevitable. Indeed, some suspect such a series would be a sign the Apocalypse is near.

Chance, Statistics, And The Game

One of the compelling aspects of baseball is how the whole enterprise skates on a mirror of luck. At the major league level, differences in talent are slight, and it really takes much of the 162-game season to sort out the pecking order among teams. Perhaps because so much of the game takes place in discrete events—pitch-by-pitch, batter-by-batter, out-by-out—statistics has been a large part of the game. Terms like batting averages, on-base percentages, and earned run averages make up the common idiom.

I recently read Curve Ball, by Jim Albert and Jay Bennett, a book that takes a look at the plethora of statistics in baseball from the point of view of a couple of academic statisticians. It’s an excellent introduction to thinking probabilistically about baseball. Some numbers are meaningful, some are not. Often broadcasters will say things like: “His lifetime batting against Jamie Moyer is 4 out of 11”. Even though this represents a batting average of .364—very high—it is a statistically meaningless ratio since with so few at bats the result is probably due to luck. Other times intuitions lead managers quantitatively astray. Albert and Bennett give the example of Barry Bonds being walked intentionally so often in the 2002 season (a pattern which has persisted in this season). Despite Bonds’ immense home run threat, when one goes through the play-by-play probabilities, it turns out in terms of expected runs that one is better off pitching to Bonds rather than putting him on intentionally in almost all situations.

Baseball is a game where the unlikely turns commonplace, given all things that can occur. How often does a team score 10 runs in a single inning? Not very often, but the Giants did it last night in a game against the Houston Astros.

The Red Sox will be the AL wild card team unless a) they lose all of their final four games of the season and b) the Seattle Mariners sweep the Oakland A’s in their final series this weekend. Let’s hope that unlikely combination doesn’t come to pass.