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

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+

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.

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.

How embarrassing...

[FrYGuY101]

Everquest players caught playing baseball... how tragic!

Like my father used to say

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no crying in math.

o_O

[TechnologyX]

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

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.