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

Well...

[TheKidWho]

All this talk about projectile motion is making me itch to play a game of grand theft auto

Re:Well...

[raider_red]

Forget the games. I'm going to the shooting range.

MIT Grads

[jazman_777]

...His degree in Aerospace Engineering must have stood him in good stead as he observed the ballistic trajectory of a Barry Bonds fly ball...

He's only doing a case study.

Gravity

[PepsiProgrammer]

One might say Bonds fought he law, and the law won.

What? You want a Prada?

[mikeophile]

For the last few seasons, the Padres reliever with the least experience has to carry a pink Barbie backpack filled with candy, sunflower seeds and whatever else relievers like to have during games. The low man carries it out to the bullpen.

"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.

sequence

[name773]

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!

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:sequence

[aridhol]

But Alexa determines rank by the installation of spyware. Most slashdotters know enough about spyware to not have Alexa installed.

There is a future in Baseball for Geeks

[Pave Low]

and it's not on the field. It's in the front office.

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.

Re:There is a future in Baseball for Geeks

[Aardpig]

Now, there's hope for geeks with math and statistics degrees who want to break into baseball.

Let's face it, however, they still won't get laid.

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:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[AaronBS]

World Series is not named so as to imply global significance, its orginal sponsor was a newspaper called the New York World.

Actually a quick google search reveals otherwise.

Re:Most Geek Sport - I think not

[Moofie]

Why are we having a pissing contest about the two most boring sports ever?

How embarrassing...

[FrYGuY101]

Everquest players caught playing baseball... how tragic!

Like my father used to say

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no crying in math.

Re:Like my father used to say

[eupheric]

John von Neumann was my Ph.D advisor, and he called me a talking pile of pigshit! And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me give my dissertation defense! And did I cry? NO! NO! And do you know why? BECAUSE THERE'S NO CRYING IN MATH!

o_O

[TechnologyX]

Slashdot... sports? You do realize that would involve getting up and moving right?

But wait...

[re-Verse]

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.

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.

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

A geek attempts to interpret baseball

[SnappingTurtle]

Bonds remained on hold with 659 homers
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.

"How about a good old-fashioned Sports story?

[brianc]

What is this Sports of which you speak?

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.