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."

Comments

Most Geek Sport - I think not

[spindizzy]

"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.

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[spindizzy]

So curling is a major world sport by that metric? Ice dancing too? See how many people tuned into the last Cricket World Cup final and compare it with the 'World' Series.

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[Speed Racer]

So curling is a major world sport by that metric? Ice dancing too?

Come on now, that's the Winter Olympics. Additionally, since cricket and baseball are at least similar, it's a relevant comparison, unlike yours.

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[Anonymous Coward]

Baseball is insanely popular in Latin America, perhaps even more so than in the states. Add that to its popularity in Japan, and I think you could easily say baseball is more of a world sport than cricket. It's not our fault Europe hasn't caught on yet :)

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[rgmoore]

You might want to check out cricket, www.cricinfo.org and Wisden for some serious stats.

Perhaps it is you who needs to be enlightened. A brief look at the stats glossary at Baseball Prospectus might show you just how far out the geekier baseball fans are willing to go. Some other sites of interest include Baseball Reference, which contains complete statistics for every player ever to appear in a major league game, and Retrosheet, an organization attempting to gather historical play-by-play information on every game in MLB history. The detail put into these things is frightening.

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[Reality Master 101]

Baseball's only a fairly minor sport in world terms.

In "world terms", there are only two major sports: soccer and basketball.

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[rgmoore]

In "world terms", there are only two major sports: soccer and basketball.

You'd better restrict that to major team sports. I think that you'll find that many individual sports- like track and field, golf, tennis, etc.- are fairly important on an international scale. Some people also count auto racing as a sport, and it clearly has significant worldwide appeal.

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[drinkypoo]

This is why the olympics piss me off. Nothing without a clear metric should be an olympic sport. Ice dancing? Lame. Synchronized swimming? Until they're scoring it with motion capture, I'm not interested, and even then I'm only interested if they get some really skimpy suits and give me the underwater cam. In most olympic sports you're competing against the judges, not the other team, and I think that's dumb.

Re:What a load of rot.

[Em Emalb]

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.

Re:Curt Schilling, -NOT- a HOF'er.

[kalidasa]

Schilling is likely to make it to at least 40, at an average of 15 games per season if he stays healthy and plays with a winning team (he managed four 15 or more win seasons and one 14-win season in *Philadelphia* for heaven's sake), giving him about 209 wins over 20 seasons. I'd say he's on the cusp, given how poor some of those Philadelphia teams were, and how good his first two seasons with Arizona were.

Re:sequence

[Ryan Amos]

Yes, but ESPN is the place sports nuts go to get their news. It's like the Slashdot of sports, only there are a lot more sports nuts than tech geeks. I'm actually surprised espn.com isn't in the top 5.

Re:sequence

[anon*127.0.0.1]

Actually, sports nuts get their news and stuff from TV, or the newspaper. Sure, a sizeable number get their news online, but it's probably a much smaller percentage the the number of geeks who get their news from /.

Re:Curt Schilling, -NOT- a HOF'er - YET

[JordanH]

• 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.

Baseball may have highest Geek Quotient, but...

[Infonaut]

to play American football at the professional level, you have to be thinking every second. You not only have all of those different plays to memorize, you have to know where you are in relation to the rest of your teammates. The guys who play on the line have a particularly difficult job, because they're grappling with 300lb.+ opponents while reacting to the play around them.

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.