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

Re:sequence

[Elwood P Dowd]

You've got to be kidding me.
Go.com is the 21st most trafficked site on the web. (Over half of that is for ESPN.)

Slashdot is 1000+

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[Speed Racer]

And there have been, what, three summer Olympics where baseball was a medal sport and not exhibition?

Well, it will be 4 in a few months, assuming the Greeks can pull things together. Also, it would have become a medal sport back in 1940 during the scheduled games in Japan but there was this World War going on at the time and it kind of got lost in the shuffle.

I love baseball..

[erick99]

..it's the only sport I followed and it was my favorite sport as a child. It's true that it is a sport that creates a statistic for every possible activity. I think that it gives the announcers something to talk about between pitches, which can be interminable in some games. It also makes for great baseball card collecting. For a game that seems to move only in fits and starts there is an amazing amount of strategy. I love watching someone who doesn't know much about the game watch a manager purposely load the bases so that there can be an "out" at any plate. It seems crazy to folks who don't follow the game. Or, how about the "infield fly rule?" What other sport could have a rule as seemingly convoluted as that?

Happy Trails!

Erick

Doug Glanville is THE alpha baseball geek

[UVABlows]

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.

Trip to africa - http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=173085 1
Astronomy club - http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=177197 8

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Naw dude, Schilling is a good player but he isn't hall of fame material. If you look at starters in the hall, there is only one guy with around 200 wins, and his name is Koufax. If Schilling goes nuts and wins 25 games the next two years, winning the title for the Red Sox then yeah, he's in. Otherwise he's gonna have to get around 275 wins to be considered.

Re:What a load of rot.

[flabbergast]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this out. Schilling is 39th all time in ERA relative to league average - which is pretty damn good. The only question mark about Schilling is whether or not he'll get enough counting stats to make it into the HOF - he's certainly got the rate stats to qualify. In other words, he's good enough - but will he pitch long enough.

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.

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[contradyction]

Quick, name the countries that have won Olympic gold medals in cricket.

Great Britain. Idiot.

It ain't just the players.

[endquotedotcom]

The Seattle Weekly just did cover story on amateur baseball stats geeks who claim to know more than MLB:

"It is a wonderful thing to know you are right and the rest of the world is wrong." Bill James wrote those words nearly 20 years ago in one of his groundbreaking series of annual Baseball Abstract books. The founding father of the objective performance analysis movement came to realize that baseball is the one game in which virtually every aspect of performance can be measured and value-weighted through the compilation and analysis of statistics, in much the same way a business can use data about sales and revenue, weigh them against market-force indicators, and make quarterly projections about expected future performance. He found that the statistics can be used to predict, with reasonable accuracy, what teams will win and which players will be effective. James also found, to his surprise, that the people who ran Major League Baseball organizations didn't much give a shit.

Re:Baseball may have highest Geek Quotient, but...

[Ray Radlein]

I certainly agree that football involves a lot more thinking and planning than people usually credit.

If you're up at, like, 3:00 AM or so during football season, ESPN has a show called Edge NFL Matchup, hosted by Suzy Kolber, Ron Jaworski, and, er, some other guy whose name has just flown out of my head. A lot of the show is stock football stuff, but every so often they will break down not just the execution of plays, but their design -- and it can be quite fascinating.

I remember watching them explain one play where they went over every last bit of it for like five minutes or so, explaining what every player on offense was doing, and what the expected defensive reactions would be; and the upshot of it was a play where, basically, every last player was involved in some specific set of actions designed solely for the purpose of getting the right cornerback to turn his hips slightly towards the inside of the field at just the wrong moment, so that the receiver could break off his move. It was so intricate, so meticulously planned, and so well explained, that I can't imagine any True Geek not getting a rush out of it. Their explanation, with the film, and the diagrams and arrows they superimposed, was like single-stepping through an elegant piece of code in a good debugging environment, watching all the variables change just so as everything falls into place.

I played at MIT as well...

[alouts]

... I graduated the spring before he got there, and I've got to say, *everything* he says about the field and the team is dead on. The fence really was made of this orange vinyl road fencing, the outfield was torn all to hell, and we had to literally chase people off our field multiple times at every home game. We had two old guys who would show up to every game, and aside from the occasional girlfriend in the stands, and that was it.

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!

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[leviramsey]

I define sport as: "a [physically] athletic recreation where defense can be played."

auto racing, chess, etc. lose on the first count.

Golf, figure skating, weightlifting, most track and field events, etc. lose on the second.