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Rounding the Bases Faster, With Math
An anonymous reader writes "The fastest route around the bases, mathematicians show, is one that perhaps no major-league ball player has ever run: It swings out a full 18.5 feet from the baseline, nearly forming a full circle. 'I would definitely experiment with it,' says former American Major League Baseball outfielder Doug Glanville, who last played with the Philadelphia Phillies. 'There's no question in my mind that runners could be more efficient.'"
1st page of the proof:
Consider a spherical runner in a frictionless vacuum.
If that really worked, everybody would be doing it already.
And indeed, baseball players typically do this: They run straight along the baseline at the beginning and then, if they think they’ve hit a double or more, they bow out to make a “banana curve. ... Carozza noticed that even when the ball heads straight for a pocket between fielders, making a double almost certain, runners almost never curve out right away.
The researcher seems to expect ball players to gamble with every such run, betting their play on what the researcher thinks is "almost certain". That means that, while trying to hit the ball, the player must know the tactics and maximum speeds of all the opponent fielders. I don't think that's going to happen.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Huh? You're trying to get to who?
The main reason why they've calculated a circular path is because of the delays that sharp turns introduce. As far as I can tell, this path makes sense if and only if you're trying to run from home to home. If you're going for a single, or a double, or a triple, you'd have different ideal path.
So even in theory, this doesn't really pan out: nobody in MLB makes it to home-plate on an outfield hit. You could probably come up with more effective routes for doubles and triples, but on the other hand, it's probably hard to tell if you've hit a triple right as you start running. If you make a hit that would be a triple, but follow a route like it's a single and then change your mind as the ball gets played, you'll probably still end up with a single or a double. If you start running for a triple on a base hit that's only really going to get you a single, it could slow you down enough to get you out. I'm more in the hedge-your-bets camp, and I'm betting that, on that basis, this isn't an effective way to go.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Players don't run in a big circle because there is no reasonable expectation they can round all four bases. They're lucky to get one.
You get a hit, you run straight for 1st. If after arriving you can keep going, you curve over to second. Unless you belted it out of the park (and are therefore in little hurry) it's unlikely you can get further than that, but anybody going on to 3rd will make another wide curve.
In general, if a runner thinks he can clear two bases, he'll make a wide curve. Otherwise it's just a beeline for the next base.
naturally!
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I thought that too, but wikipedia and other online sources say that this only applies when a defensive player is attempting to make a play on the runner. At that point the runner must proceed on the most direct path to the base, without deviating by more than 3ft, otherwise the runner is called out.
Online references aside, this makes a lot of sense thinking of the baseball that I've played and watched on tv.
You can be called out if you stray too far from the base line.
I cannot find anything in the rules saying that. Only thing I can find at all related is rule 7.08 (a) (1), which only applies if they move away from the base line to avoid being tagged.
AFAICT, they can run where ever they like as long as they don't interfere with the fielders.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
LOL troll.
Nah, you have a good point. Baseball was the only sport to require an organist to fill in the boring parts.
Modern baseball games are even worse. Even live, only a fifth of the game is actual baseball. The rest is filler provided by the jumbotrons and sound systems. The only redeeming qualities of going to meatspace MLB games are getting really drunk and laughing inside about how our kids don't fully understand the meaning of the popular song Hey-oh that's being played every 5 seconds over the PA.
"At first you might think that a very slow, awkward runner should just walk directly from base to base, except that he'd likely fall down trying to make the sharp turn at first.."
I would like to point something out.
Making a 90 degree turn is physically impossible without coming to a complete stop. If a person immediately applies a force orthogonal to their current velocity, it would not result in a 90 degree turn in the path (but it would probably cause them to fall down). The only way to make a 90 degree turn is to come to a complete stop, then turn, then accelerate in the new direction. There would be no reason for the runner to fall down under these circumstances.
Because our muscles exert a finite amount of force, and force is the time rate of change of momentum, and momentum is mass times velocity, the time required to come to a stop must be proportional to the velocity of the runner.
This confirms the obvious fact that for a walker, the time that it takes to go from walking speed to a full stop is a fraction of a second, and hence there is no measurable time wasted in making a 90 degree turn, and no reason to walk anything other than the shortest path if you are walking.
We know that the optimal path for a faster runner involves some overshooting, and this proves that there is a continuum of optimal paths that is dependent on velocity. It is also clear from Newton's first law, as I showed above, that running faster befits reducing curvature of the path. This applies to any velocity. Thus, in the limit as velocity goes to infinity, curvature becomes ever increasingly important, and hence in the limit the optimal path must be a circle.
And just to be clear, the base line isn't the dirt path between the bases with the line painted on it forming the diamond shape. The base line in this rule is a line from the runners current position to the base when the defensive players are attempting to tag the runner out with the ball.
No, Who is on first, What is on second. I Don't Know is on third. FFS what do they TEACH you kids these days?
Now get off my lawn!
It is thus obvious that this rule should be repealed, and, furthermore, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" should be replaced in all occurrences with "Yakety Sax".
This is pretty funny. If we were talking about Halo, we wouldn't see so many naive claims and theories, and so many of them moderated up! Instead of replying to each one, let me clarify a few points:
A major league batter knows the base he'll likely reach as soon as he knows where the ball will land. Having seen many thousands of hits, he can make a pretty good judgement pretty quickly. I've merely watched the games, and I can tell you well before the ball lands. It's all done without any math or calculations, if you can believe it, just rules of thumb based on experience:
* Over the center-fielder's head is a triple
* Reaching the wall elsewhere: a double
* Doesn't get by the outfielders: a single.
There are variables from that 'baseline': The defense could make a play on another baserunner, giving the batter the chance to get another base. Fielding mistakes, and sometimes a hard hit, a very fast/slow runner, or a very good/bad arm can make a difference of a base, but it's rare.
For the other question, I really don't know for sure. Baserunners are regularly outside the baselines, but I've rarely seen a baserunner go that far out unless he was avoiding a tag, taking out a fielder in a double-play, or over-running first base. But they sometimes round bases pretty widely without being called out. The rules are more complicated than they appear and the umps have discretion. I don't know for sure, but I doubt they'd be called out unless they were avoiding a tag or interfering with a fielder. I wouldn't depend on an answer that didn't come from an umpire.
I'm just a long-time avid baseball fan. I'm surprised I don't see more on /.; baseball depends heavily on a very controlled environment (batter vs pitcher) and is accessible to extensive statistical analysis. For those interested, I recommend Baseball Prospectus, Baseball Think Factory, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), and the writings of Bill James, the great modern popularizer of the statistical analysis of baseball (I think of him as the Bruce Schneier of baseball -- very insightful, clear analysis). Now, back to your regularly scheduled News for Nerds ...
There is something to what you say. However, what an experienced batter won't know is how the fielder will choose to play the ball. That means that the batter doesn't know if it will be over the fielder's head or not. Additionally, that knowledge of where the ball will land is really only true in his home park. Over the course of this past baseball season, I saw several occasions where a home team batter got an extra base because of where the ball landed that on another night a visiting team batter did not. The reason for this was that the home team batter knew that the ball hit to that spot would take a tricky bounce while the visiting team batter did not. This was compounded by the fact that the home team fielder also knew that the ball would take a tricky bounce and the visiting team fielder did not (I only noticed this particular occurrence because the announcers pointed it out, but in future games after that I noticed that the home team fielders consistently fielded balls hit to that area better than visiting team fielders).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison