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

[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: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.