Slashdot Mirror
Rocket Science vs. Barry Bonds
Ray Radlein writes "How about a good old-fashioned Sports story? With its multitude of different statistical measures, baseball has always had the highest Geek Quotient of any major sport. Alpha Geeks of Baseball have included former relief pitcher Rob Murphy, who put his Computer Science degree to good use writing software to evaluate thoroughbred race horses, and Boston Red Sox ace and probable future Hall of Famer Curt Schilling, who not only runs a company that makes hex-based war games, but once got embroiled in an on-field feud due to Everquest. However, Baseball Geeks have a new hero to look up to: Jason Szuminski, who on Sunday became the first MIT graduate to pitch in a major league baseball game. His degree in Aerospace Engineering must have stood him in good stead as he observed the ballistic trajectory of a Barry Bonds fly ball which just barely stayed inside the Padres' new stadium."
All this talk about projectile motion is making me itch to play a game of grand theft auto
He's only doing a case study.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
are there any rocket scientists that figure out if there are too many links in a paragraph?
-------
FM Clan
One might say Bonds fought he law, and the law won.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Each link can be right clicked, which in turn brings up a context menu with different sub-links to choose from. Maybe combine this with gestures, and multi-dimensional linking can be created.
"But what's the bag going to look like?" Szuminski asked.
Methinks this guy has been watching a little too much Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
Oh well, at least he's a pitcher and not a catcher.
So what you're saying is: baseball is basically like cricket, but it's designed for low-grade morons.
1. get killed by your friend in everquest
2. get back at him by hitting two home runs
3. take down the espn servers by linking it to slashdot
4. ???
5. profit!
The generation of Moneyball General Managers is here. Billy Beane, John DePodesta (Harvard), Theo Epstein (Yale) are paving the way for seamheads who know baseball and use statistical analysis to build their teams.
Now, there's hope for geeks with math and statistics degrees who want to break into baseball.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
"With its multitude of different statistical measures, baseball has always had the highest Geek Quotient of any major sport."
You might want to check out cricket, www.cricinfo.org and Wisden for some serious stats.
Not to mention that with all the offshoring to India there's a huge cricket loving geek population there. Baseball's only a fairly minor sport in world terms.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
-I am an elective eunuch.
I think steroid use is more of an explanation for some of the "advancements" of sports.
try:
The Sacred Church of Major League Baseball.
anything less is sacrilege.
Everquest players caught playing baseball... how tragic!
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
"How about a good old-fashioned Sports story?" was all I read before I fell asleep in my La-Z-Boy.
Not really even close. He's 37 and has 164 wins. Ain't gonna happen.
-dameron
less shane warne, more spitting. mmmm... less shane warne - we can all dream can't we?
and GO BRIAN LARA. fucking legend. regaining his crown as uber batsmen from that christian wanker hayden...
You have something against catching pal? Shut up and take it like a man
What's the mathematical symbol for steroids and how would you represent it in your equation?
There's no crying in math.
Slashdot... sports? You do realize that would involve getting up and moving right?
Slashdot sucks
Ok, good one. Of course I was meaning more virtual reality, not cryogenic life extension.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Has anyone else noticed that on the link to that software company, Curt Shillings email address is on there? You'd think he'd not have it so easily accessible.
TheHustler
http://www.elmarko.org/ - Useless bilge
http://www.asylum-games.co.uk/ - Co-Founder
Hello, what about Bill James?!?
"but you have to know what a crumpt is to play cricket" - Michelangelo, when fighting Casey. TMNT
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Call me when an MIT grad makes the NFL.
I thought that cricket had the highest geek quotient out of all the sports, since you need some kind of technical degree to understand WTF is going on in the game.
I call bullshit.
Perhaps you get excited over clean code, or something else equally geeky, but let me tell you, there is very much a passion for a lot of us geeks out here in the sports arena.
As far as baseball players being unable to understand the rules, or even having seen a rule book, provide a link.
I can provide quite a few (search ESPN.com, or, even better, actually WATCH the game you profess so much loathing for) links for your reading pleasure. I'd rather you educated yourself though.
Of course, that was your opinion, this is mine, yada yada yada.
Sent from your iPad.
"'One day,' Glanville told Week in Review, "Schill was playing his character, Cylc" -- whom Glanville described as "a dwarven Cleric," whatever that is -- "and he asked me to team up with him in Faydwer, in the zone of the Butcherblock Mountains, to kill Aviaks, which are basically walking birds." Hang with us here, friends. There will be a baseball point coming. " We should return their contempt and more- bastards! I'd rather read an article about how wonderful M$ Windoze is.
I can't believe you typed that! Look at you! You idiot.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Ok smarty, explain the infield fly rule to me? Oh, you can't because you're a fucking moron? That's what I thought.
Now think about your breathing you fucking moron.
Q: Do you know what the only difference between an obnoxious American and a foreigner is?
A: One is an American.
When was the last time you opened a guide for Internet Explorer?
The guy that Schilling played everquest with, Doug Glanville has got to be the reigning baseball alpha geek. Check out the articles he wrote for espn.com. I am sure they are going to hire him when he decides to hang up cleats. Stark loves to interview him.
5 1 7 8
Trip to africa - http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=17308
Astronomy club - http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=17719
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
http://sports.espn.go.com/
Whoa!! It's hip to be square! Who knew?
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=177459 9
He was drafted origionally by the Cubs, so there's some rule that says if he didn't make another big league roster he has to go back to them.
What a jackass.
baseball has always had the highest Geek Quotient of any major sport.
I'd say auto racing, with it's high degree of computerization, engineers/designers or mechanics, and use of the grand-daddy of geekdom - radios, would rate as high or higher.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Read this for a better perspective on Bond's possible steroid use.
Roger Maris's HR totals go like this:
14, 28, 16, 39, 61, 33, 23, 26, 8, 13, 9, 5
Thanks to baseball-reference.com.
Oh, yeah, 1961 was an expansion year. Nothing like a journeyman whacking away at diluted pitching to break Ruth's single-season HR record...
PS - Barry Bonds is about the same size and weight as Brett Favre...
xxxxxxxx
You seem a little confused about this whole "baseball studies" enterprise. Saying that players are stupid is a non-sequitur. While it sounds like your dismissal of players' intelligence is the result of some sort of chip on your shoulder, let's grant for the sake of argument that the players are stupid. Ants are much stupider, and eubacteria more stupid still, but smart people can still observe them and reach interesting, non-trivial conclusions.
The idea isn't that players taken as individuals are strategic geniuses worthy of study; indeed, individual players' strengths and weaknesses are mostly set in stone by their early 20's. The questions these geeks are studying are for the most part not, e.g., "how do you pitch to left-handed slugger with such-and-such a count,"; rather, they are questions about how different players contribute to a winning team. How important is being able to hit? How do you really measure hitting (hint: not batting average)? How do you measure defensive prowess? Is it possible to separate defensive prowess from good pitching? And what is good pitching, anyway (hint: not just a low ERA)? These are essentially statistical problems, and answering them well requires that we build better mathematical models of the game than we've done in the past. Since smart people have only recently gotten interested, there are lots of results that are counter-intuitive. E.g., stellar defensive plays often make highlight reels, and play a large role in fan psychology, but data mining suggests that awesome defense doesn't matter that much.
I think maybe you don't know the difference between a fact and a conclusion.
You simply must hit the williard into some cilium with your fracaman. And remeber: it doesn't matter who wins. It matters who wins three times in a row. Tally ho!
GM of the Royals. He picked the AK rookie and Manager of the year.
Baseball is a game played by a bunch of drunken, tobacco chewing goons, illiterates from third world countries, and other assorted misfits who make their living playing a kid's game.
Gee, this is only moderately offending.
not one single player had ever SEEN a rulebook let alone OWNED one, and none of them cared to even investigate rule changes.
Right, baseball players don't know what's going on. Obviously you've never heard of Questec and baseball's infinite wisdom to install these cameras to monitor umpires. And Curt Schilling and the Braves didn't like it. So, don't tell me that baseball players don't know know what's going and and aren't going to do something about it.
I tutor statistics and calc at a big university (think Final Four) and at the 95% confidence level I reject the null hypothesis that IQfb > IQbb.
FWIW, power pitchers like Schilling tend to last longer than finesse pitchers - think Nolan Ryan here. And Schilling's a much better pitcher than Ryan. Schilling compares favorable rate-wise to Roger Clemens, who's a lock for the HOF. Schilling's only problem is the significant time he missed to injury - not uncommon at all for a pitcher.
Did you get gang raped by an entire MLB team in your early years? If not, you should have.
The reason that baseball players don't need to see a rulebook is because the rules of the game are damn simple. You don't have to worry about what consitutes one of about 20 different "penalties" like you do in football or basketball. You don't have to worry about when you can or can't do stuff. It's cake. Throw a ball to the batter. Wait for batter to hit it. Get ball, and try to get the batter out. The rules only inovlve things like foul balls and an interference call or two. That's it. It's crazy easy. That's why they don't look at rulebooks. There just aren't that many rules in baseball that aren't common sense.
I was going to claim that the only sports I consider worth watching are when female sprinters (and Venus, of course) run around in tight dresses. And I might care for a bit of thai boxing and sumo wrestling.
I generally agree with HHGTTG about cricket and consider baseboll something similar. I was going to ask if you couldn't filter those subjects on /.
But this did seem like something for me:
Does snuff count for chewing? Hmm, maybe should start.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Baseball is a game played by a bunch of drunken, tobacco chewing goons, illiterates from third world countries, and other assorted misfits who make their living playing a kid's game.
You forgot rich... they may be illiterate goons but some of them are making a hell of a lot more than me!
Be happy. Nothing else matters.
Oh, like that episode of the Simpsons where the hammock makes clones of Homer?
after failing to connect for the fifth straight game
Then get a new dial-up service!
although he was intentionally walked
They're taking that Petco thing too far.
and scored in the five-run eighth inning
Look, let's keep that kinda thing private... but scored with who?
"I'd like to do it at home," said Bonds
<butt-head>heh-heh heh-heh, he said "do it"</butt-head>
got Bonds to fly out to left
Cool! Like what the flying chair everybody thought the Segway was going to be?
San Diego's bullpen fell apart in the eighth
They obviously didn't engineer that structure very well.
San Diego manager Bruce Bochy had his only lefty reliever
Sounds like my adolescence.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
the baseball players when I went to college were universally regarded as the _dumbest_ of the sports players. Some of the least hostile, but certainly not a lot of voltage.
Now, the entire team of lesbian basketball players... they were obviously more intelligent...
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
That's how he got to the Padres and also why he had to stay on the big league roster. Otherwise, he would have gone back to the club he got drafted from (Cubs).
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
There just aren't that many rules in baseball that aren't common sense
I've had to explain the game to British visitors (familiar with cricket and rounders). So I'd have to disagree. You're just used to the rules, so they seem like common sense.
A foul is a strike, unless it's the third strike, which would make it an out, so it isn't, unless it's caught, so it's an out. Unless it's Tuesday, and...
Oh, look! How lucky you are! You've got half a Fizzbin already!
- And Schilling's a much better pitcher than Ryan.
I disagree. Ryan is better than Schilling lifetime in many important statistics like ERA and SO. I could see a claim that Schilling at his best was as good as Ryan at his best (although Ryan's 1.69 ERA season of '81 is hard to beat), but you can't credibly claim that Schilling is a much better pitcher than Ryan.Of course, these statistics aside, Ryan's No Hitter record combined with his longevity near the top make him a shoe-in for the HOF, things that Schilling will find hard to match. Ryan was a shoe-in, though, so Schilling could get in, too.
Unless i misread you:
A foul is a strike, unless it's the third strike, which would make it an out, so it isn't, unless it's caught, so it's an out. Unless it's Tuesday, and...
You've made it too complicated.
A foul is strike, unless there are not already two strikes. In which case, the foul is not strike nor a ball. Any ball caught in the air, fair or foul is an out. So that arguement is already preceded by one of the basic fundamental rules, catch a fly ball, and there is an out.
Okay, Bonds hit a home run off him, but did he really have to kick sand in his face afterwards?
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
There's an interesting blog entry about this over at Wil Wheatons blog
What is this Sports of which you speak?
SIGLOST && SIGUNUSED && SIGQUIT
Career losses for a pitcher.
Career W/L % leaders (note the lack of Nolan Ryan in this list...)
OK, so Nolan Ryan pitched for a very long time. And he was hard to get a hit off of. But he didn't win much as he never ranked higher than fourth in wins, and never higher than seventh in winning percentage.
Strikeouts and no-hitters don't matter when you walk 5 batters and game and don't win,.
Was Ryan a great pitcher? No. Was he a spectacular pitcher who belongs in the HOF? Absolutely. Just don't confuse him with Cy Young, Walter Johnson, or even Roger Clemens.
Moe Berg was a poor basball player, but he was quite intelligent, and he acted as a spy on the Nazi nuclear programs during WWII. There's an interesting book about him if you're interested.
How about Curt Schilling himself, who carries a powerbook on the road and has quicktime clips and a database of hundreds of batters?
Reportedly he also spent time on a famous red sox chat board the night before he signed with the sox, trying to make up his mind whether he should sign...and convince everyone he really was Curt Schilling(he managed to, after instantly returning questions on his career stats that, according to friends, would have taken a "good baseball researcher" at least 5-10 minutes to find).
He finished up VERY late that night(well, morning) by saying essentially "Thanks, I've decided to sign with the sox, I've always heard red sox fans were the most knowledgeable, you guys have proved it". A few hours later(heh) at the press conference, John Henry(who also logged in at one point) joked(along the lines of) "and in Curt's contract is a clause prohibiting him from staying up past midnight talking on internet chat boards the day before a game."
Please help metamoderate.
He's no joke when it comes to EQ. He even wrote a review of one of the expansion packs last year for PC Gamer (I forget which issue, I think it was one of the summer ones). That was a hoot.
Right, but intense statistical analysis won't make the ants and bacteria any more intelligent, or affect how they perform. I'm not convinced that analysis has much, if any effect on the game. Steroids had a much bigger effect. It's still brawn, not brains, that makes baseball what it is.
True exchange:
#1: What just happened?
#2: That was a double play and the inning is over because it's the third out.
A few minutes later:
#3: What inning is it?
#1: Double play.
You're only moderately offended? I hope you never read a biography of Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth.
I'm a complete sports geek, I know an oxymoron in slashdot circles because I was good too. However, baseball has always been my favorite, but poor eyesight in my left eye didn't allow me to progress as the pitches got faster even with pleading to the coaches to let me bat left handed when I could at least hit the ball for a base hit but not for power.
Now a days I'm fascinated by the little game between pitcher and batter. Not too many good match-ups because of so few good thinking pitchers. And Albert Pujols has em all figured out so maybe finally he'll win the MVP this year instead of a BALCO sponsor.
If you are even remotely interested in the game, I'd recommend reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis. It's essentially about how the Oakland A's managed to make the playoffs with next the to lowest payroll in the major leagues. All sorts of geeky stuff in it...check it out.
I think baseball *seems* complex because it's actually fairly easy to observe the nuances of the game while you're watching. You can see how much lattitude the pitcher is giving a runner. You can observe where the fielders are positioning themselves for a particular batterr, and so on. In football the matchups often change (for example, on a cross route a receiver may be covered at various times by three different defenders), and the guys on both sides of the ball have to always be ready to adjust their predetermined pattern as the play develops.
For some excellent insight into the world of an offensive lineman in the NFL, check out this story (written by "Blackhawk Down" author Mark Bowden) about the day to day life of Eagle's center Hank Fraley.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Right, but intense statistical analysis won't make the ants and bacteria any more intelligent, or affect how they perform.
No freaking kidding. That's why I chose the analogy. The only person claiming that studying baseball will make individual players more intelligent is you. What studying baseball has accomplished, and will continue to accomplish, is making managers better able to decide the value of individual players. Capiche?
Let's get out the sock puppets, ok? Suppose you attach tiny little harnesses to ants, and have them pull carriages. That's what you do for a living. You make money at it, and you're locked in a zero-sum struggle with other ant-carriage competitors for your slice of the ant carriage pie. Conventional wisdom, and tradition, dictate that red ants are the best sort of ants for this work. However, you've done some scientific study, and discovered that, in fact, army ants are ideal. You're able to reduce your costs, and you wipe the floor with your competition, at least until they catch on.
Notice that the ants are no more intelligent; yet your "ant team," as it were, is more effective than it would have been had you not studied the task.
As for your claim that steroids are the dominating factor in the modern game, how would you back up such a claim? Home run records get headlines, but it is far from clear that they win pennants. The only way you would be able to argue this point would be to study baseball in a systematic way, the very thing you're claiming is a waste of time.
This is exactly the sort of strategery that made baseball into the most boring game on earth. People don't come to watch the managers' decisions, they come to watch the players pitch, catch, hit, and run.
My old grandpa had a good joke he used to play on people like you. When he'd hear football fans arguing strategy, he'd impart one of his little gems of wisdom, "over 90% of all football games are won in the 4th quarter." Of course nobody ever got it. Most football games are won at exactly the end of the 4th quarter, because that is when the score is recorded. The only exceptions are overtime games.
Makes for a good pickup line.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I'd just like to point out that whoever modded the parent post down is a total moron - the parent was right, Szuminski is on the Padre major league squad because of Rule V.
Well, Richard 'The King' Petty attended either Oxford University or the Isaac Newton Institute to pursue his love for mathematics, before switching gears and joining stock car racing in 1964. He made some pretty amazing contributions in cohomology and utilized Steenrod Algebra to solve certain problems within Adem relation fields. Now he holds the steering wheel left for 500 laps and goes in circles.
Better yet, there were no restrictions on who could play - anyone could make the team if they just showed up. My senior year, two guys on the team had *never* played before. Mix that in with a few good players and you have a really weird dynamic for the season. After being part of a really strong high school program, and garnering a decent amount of scouting attention, I absolutely know what he means by "playing down" to the level of your surroundings. It was sort of a letdown when I got there, but not really all that shocking - I didn't go there to make a career pitching.
I had a great time, but it definitely wasn't a place you go to nurture your athletic skills. I'm glad to see that someone stayed focused enough to make it though, if only so that I can live through him vicariously!
A Harvard degree does not impress me.
You can get through a liberal arts education and still be considered a dumbass in my book.
No offense intended. Those jocks probably are smart. Incidentally I was an uber jock in highschool and I know for a fact that Brown and Dartmouth cheat by giving academic scholarships to athelets that do not deserve them. (Dartmouth was the worst btw: they kept sending letters to a B student football player and didn't even accept our fucking valedictorian - man he was pissed when he found out.)
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
baseball wrong, man with four balls cannot walk!
One thing that sucks about Slashdot (defaults) - if someone replies to a -1 post, it seems as if they're responding to thin air.
im not a nascar fan either; major boring shit to watch. but props to the guys who strap 1500lb of handmade steel to their ass and go way too fast for way too long in worse traffic than the eisenhower expressway at 4pm on a friday.
Who was comparing him to any of those pitchers? You were comparing him unfavorably to Schilling and I disagreed.
I don't think most experts are that impressed by win/loss record as that has so much to do with the teams around you. Note the relative lack of HOFers on the career W/L% list, for example. Note also Schilling is missing from this list.
For Ryan's long career, he played on a lot of mediocre teams.
To his credit, Ryan does have some great records to be proud of. Like, hits allowed, innings pitched and Hits allowed/9IP. The book is still being written on Schilling, but will he hold any carreer records in any category when it's done?
What is wrong with today's youth?
"today's"(sic.)? "Today is youth"? You fail to use a contraction for "What is", creating a clumsy sentence at best, then incorrectly insert a apostrophe into "todays" as though it's a contraction of "today is"?
Why are they completely incapable of writing a single sentence in English?
Why don't you figure it out and let is know?
Glanville had a brief stint down here in Texas last year, which was a nice break for me in an otherwise dismal season. Doug's probably my favorite bad player (he's always trending asymptotic to that Mendoza Line), and is certainly the smartest man in the game, right next to Schilling. The story about him is that that Phillies got their money's worth, not from his playing, but from a renovation and traffic control engineering study he did on their stadium. -Watchful Babbler
I worked with Szumiski on a semester long project in an aerodynamics course at MIT. There's no doubting he's a great pitcher, but he didn't do a damn bit of work in that class (or many others, so I've heard). We met the night bfore it was due to collect all the parts and put them into a paper, and he never showed up. He never sent us his part, but we did get an email from him telling us he couldn't be there because, while working round his frat, he got cement in his eye.
by far the most high tech pitcher in baseball. Schilling carries a laptop with archives of every batter he has faced, he also carries video of what other pitchers have done against batters. He has over a 1000 hours of footage, and also has dozen of sprial notebooks with notes.
lets not forget the Schilling VS Arod (best hitter in the game) match at the allstar game. Schilling calls time out before the at bat starts, walks up to AROD and says your getting 3 fastballs. He struck out on the 3rd fast ball clocked at 98mph.
-numtin
There is an effort to get bridge qualified as an Olympic sport. I kid you not.
As a dues-paying member of the ACBL, I find this insane.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I think Ryan was a better pitcher than Schilling: Ryan is a shoe-in, Schilling a borderline case. I think if Schilling had pitched for a more stable team than Philly his numbers would look a lot better. Look at Clemens's numbers his last 2 years with the Sox (when Clemens was getting no run support and no real defensive support) and compare them to his numbers in NY. BTW, I'd expect Schilling's numbers his first year with the Sox (with the current roster) to be superb.
Among the things Bill James tracked in one of his old Abstracts was the length of games pitched by different starters. Rick Sutcliff was the slowest pitcher in the bigs, I believe. So yeah -- they even have stats for that. And they use them; when MLB wanted to speed up the games a few years back, a maximum delay between pitches was one of their options.
Mostly baseball lets you keep such granular stats because things happen in isolation. One pitcher vs. one hitter, one outfielder's numbers on balls hit to left field, and so on. When the stats become more shared in their scope, it can be as muddy as any other sport. (Knuckleball pitchers get a lot of "passed balls" assessed on their catchers: same as a wild pitch but for some reason those get "blamed" on the catcher. Double-plays-turned is harder to judge because it takes a combination of [mostly] infielders, so that you're judging combinations of shortstops and second basemen -- harder to put in someone's line. And so on. Heck, even earned runs is pretty flaky, leaving alone "Wins.")
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Ok, if the rules of baseball are so simple, explain these 3 things to me:
1) What are all the ways for the batter to reach first?
2) What are all the home field rules for all the stadiums in the league?
3) What is a balk? Not in general terms, but the objective rules measuring the pitcher's actions which result in a balk.
Its called sarcasm. Yes, Ty and the Babe are products of their era, but to call baseball players "illiterates from third world countries" is plain racist, because its an obvious implication against Dominican/Puerto Rican/Cuban baseball players who are, according to white america, ruining baseball.
Its funny though, if someone (a baseball player in particular) came out and said " we should have limits on the number of foreign born players in MLB" people would go nuts screaming racism. Yet, a LPGA pro comes out and says there should be limits on asians in the LPGA and no one blinks. Okay, a few sports commentators blink, but no one else seems to care. Why? Because its the LPGA? Because its asians and we're really not a minority in the same sense as latinos or african americans? Or because we refuse to rally ourselves to causes like this?
No, its not funny, its sarcasm, and it also very sad.