Slashdot Mirror
Baseball Software Can't Score What Jean Segura Did Friday
JimboFBX writes "Interesting piece of baseball history happened on Friday. Jean Segura of the Milwaukee Brewers stole second, tried to steal third too early, but made it back to second before being tagged. The problem was that teammate Ryan Braun already made it to second on the steal attempt. After tags were applied to both baserunners, Segura started trotting to the dugout before realizing that he wasn't out, Braun was, and his only option was to make it back to first. He then of course proceeded to try to steal second base again. The software for keeping the box score? Doesn't (yet) support someone running backwards on the bases. Looks like that will have to change."
Here is video of the sequence.
I've had this same problem with women. One day you can get to second or even third base, then suddenly you're sent scrambling for first again. Wasn't sure how to score that either, but as long as you're still in the game, it's a win, right? ;)
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
A treasury of wacky baseball rules situations, now out of print (watch out for more recent titles with the same name, chances are it's a completely different book).
I remember getting approx. 0 percent right.
Even after reading the summary twice, I still have no idea what happened.
Doesn't help that I live in Europe where we basically don't care about Baseball.
Segura was out when he abandoned the bases by "trotting back to the dugout". You can't do that and come back.
what would abbot & costello say about all this?
It's fucking Baseball. Seriously, not News for Nerds *or* Stuff that Matters.
Ahem.
... Who's on first?
I couldn't agree more. +1 internets to you sir.
I'll add that sometimes I think baseball only exists so that wannabe numerologists can get off on all the stats.
You think there aren't baseball nerds?
Why don't you list for us exactly what subjects are nerd-worthy and which aren't?
This is one of the reasons you should make sure that users can manually edit things, even if they are fully automated.
Yes, this allows users to break stuff but then it's their responsibility. More importantly it allows people to work around the system and solve unforeseen problems.
we would need a human who understands it first.
Some nerds actually enjoy the game of baseball. There is a lot of strategy and nuance that people who aren't familiar with the game don't understand, like any other recreational activity.
A terrorist bombing, an explosion and now this!
Also: in football,basketball, soccer, volleyball, and all sports played with a ball, you score with the ball and in baseball the ball prevents you from scoring.
In most sports the team is run by a coach; in baseball the team is run by a manager. And only in baseball does the manager or coach wear the same clothing the players do. If you'd ever seen John Madden in his Oakland Raiders uniform,you'd know the reason for this custom.
Now, I've mentioned football. Baseball & football are the two most popular spectator sports in this country. And as such, it seems they ought to be able to tell us something about ourselves and our values.
I enjoy comparing baseball and football:
Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
In football you wear a helmet. In baseball you wear a cap.
Football is concerned with downs - what down is it? Baseball is concerned with ups - who's up?
In football you receive a penalty. In baseball you make an error.
In football the specialist comes in to kick. In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness. Baseball has the sacrifice.
Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog... In baseball, if it rains, we don't go out to play.
Baseball has the seventh inning stretch. Football has the two minute warning.
Baseball has no time limit: we don't know when it's gonna end - might have extra innings. Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we've got to go to sudden death.
In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness. In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.
And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:
In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.
In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I'll be safe at home! - George Carlin
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/humor7.shtml
George Carlin - “Baseball is the only major sport that appears backward in a mirror”
I'll add that sometimes I think baseball only exists so that wannabe numerologists can get off on all the stats.
Absolutely! And that's nerdy, and that's why this belongs on /..
That play was one of the coolest things I've seen since Martin Prado flipped his bat away only to have it land on end:
Bat lands on end.
We are always going to need referees who know the rules of the game, so what purpose could this software ever serve?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
To quote professor Frink, "Baseball is a game played by the dextrous, but only understood by the pointdexterous."
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a Youtube clip to link to. The episode is "MoneyBart" (Season 22, Episode 3).
We can all be bleacher bums, because, face it, it is baseball !! Strike !! Ball !! Swing (miss) !! ... Walk. Ground out. Fly out. Strike out !! Come on back, folks, we got 17 more of these !!
Everybody knows what an asterisk is for.
figgers it has to happen in a cubs game when the cubs play odd stuff happens in the games.
they should add more video replay when updating the software.
la seguridad por oscuridad
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfTxXYE4yFY
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Especially if you don't play it.
...that JimboFBX needs to get a life. It's fucking Baseball.
The story is about the software used to score games. It appears to have a very difficult to surface bug.
Apart from that, you're an idiot. It's a game of physics, hundred plus mile an hour fastballs through palmballs. It's Mike Scioscia "smallball" vs. the New York Yankees payroll. It's Spring training vs. World Series vs. World Baseball Classic. It's dirt poor kids in sandlots in the Dominican Republic or Venezuela making it to The Show and becoming national heroes. It's seeing Fernando Valenzuela playing against the Calgary Cannons, fighting his way back into the majors (he made it).
Beats the crap out of shit like the NFL and NBA and there's no cheerleaders or glitzy half-time shows.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
"Segura started trotting to the dugout before realizing that he wasn't out, Braun was, and his only option was to make it back to first."
Sounds like he should be out automatically for trotting to the dugout and then going to first.
I'm really confused as to why this is "news". So some software doesn't support a feature? That's nice, I guess, but not very newsworthy.
News is not written anywhere on this site, therefore anything is appropriate.
If you haven't actually heard Carlin deliver this bit, it's merely interesting. I've heard him deliver it, and at least half the value is in his intonation. Dig up a link if you can find it. Left as an exercise to the reader.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Huh? So when is a nipple supposed to slip out of something? After all, that's why people watch that crap!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As someone else pointed out (and on the video), Segura stayed on the basepath.
Yes, a baserunner can be out if they're off the basepath, but Segura was still IN the basepath when he was trotting back to the dugout... and then was able to make it safely to first base when he thought he was out. The way a baseball infield is designed , the home team dugout is aligned on the right side of the field with first and second base, the visiting team is aligned on the left side of the field with second and third base. So trotting from second base to either dugout would have kept Segura within the ~6 feet wide basepath, although a baserunner can still safely go outside of the basepath depending on the situation, it's usually discretionary and the closest umpire will call the play (i.e. a runner going outside the basepath to avoid a fielder's tag would be called out for being outside the basepath, but another baserunner can go outside the basepath to avoid interfering a fielder fielding the baseball.)
I know no one bothers to RTFA, but in this case if you WTFV you would have seen that Segura never was more than a foot or two off the base path at any time during this whole ordeal.
He stepped slight inside the infield grass running back to 2nd, but still easily within the acceptable limits of the imaginary basepath, and he stepped a few steps off of 1st as if he was going to the dugout but was stopped by the 1st base coach.
I had no idea you could go backwards on the bases.
As a software engineer, I blame it on poor requirement documents and insufficient use case permutations.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Sports is for jocks, the sworn enemy of nerds.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
He never left the base path, therefor he can't be called out.
It was stupid officiating by the umpires why would somebody assume that the score keepers or software would need to account for this? They should have correctly called them both out because they were both tagged presumably. I've watched the video but this is one of those where the officials f*d up situations. It's kind of like George Brett and the whole Pine Tar shimozzle... where they actually had to restart a game after the League office overruled the officials on the field. How do you score that one? 5-4 win for the Royals over the Yankees. I remember the vid of Brett coming barrelling out of the dugout after being called out.. It was a hilarious acting job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrTYdlaqtxE
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
It's a game of physics, hundred plus mile an hour fastballs through palmballs. It's Mike Scioscia "smallball" vs. the New York Yankees payroll. It's Spring training vs. World Series vs. World Baseball Classic. It's dirt poor kids in sandlots in the Dominican Republic or Venezuela making it to The Show and becoming national heroes. It's seeing Fernando Valenzuela playing against the Calgary Cannons, fighting his way back into the majors (he made it).
Beats the crap out of shit like the NFL and NBA and there's no cheerleaders or glitzy half-time shows.
To all that I simply reply, "Zzzzzzzzz". I feel the same about football and basketball.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nobody needs to count anything other then goals. And that should only take a two bit field, at most.
*Football, for all you non-USAians.
Have gnu, will travel.
The news is you can crash the scoring software if you perform a move legal but bizarre.
I'm not a baseball fan, though I can appreciate the sports difficulties having played my own fair share of sandlot games.
Basketball I don't understand as a sport. Well, let me modify that. I understand basketball as a sport if played by people like me ... 5' 6" white guy who can't jump.
I dont' see professional or collage basketball as a sport. Its a 'team' of people ... all of which can jump from half court and drop the ball in the goal without completely extending their arm to its full reach. Its like me calling it a sport as I stand over the trashcan and slam dunk spit balls.
In case you haven't noticed the other sports though. Cheerleaders in pro's are pretty fucking ugly. Mostly past their prime women who haven't realized they haven't been hot for years, mostly just spackle (sorry makeup) covered dogs. College is only slightly better, there its the not completely used up whores doing it, still beat with the ugly stick, just a few years younger. Women who are actually hot don't have to become cheerleaders to get attention.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The umps are wrong. Each runner has an entitled base. They are only safe at that base, and no others... If the runner behind you takes your base, you must advance to the next to be safe, you aren't safe anywhere else..
The correct call, Seguro, not the runner from 1st, was out at second. The moment that runner touched 2nd base it was his, seguro's base became 3rd and he's out if tagged anywhere else on the field.
This is very, very clearly spelled out in the rules of baseball. You can't run backwards, it's against the rules, and whoever supervises the umpires needs to pull that entire team in for review and suspension for blowing a series of calls that severely.
That play went 1-5-1-2-4
he should be out because he is tagged a second time WHEN OFF THE BASE after getting up....so it should have just been two outs
Billy Beane forever changed the game into a thinking man's vocation. Hitting, throwing, and running is still for jocks, but player value assessment has been taken over by the Bill James' school of thought. Check out the Baseball Abstract.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Although it was not passed until 1920, after Schaefer's death, rule 7.08i states that a player is out if "After he has acquired legal possession of a base, he runs the bases in reverse order for the purpose of confusing the defense or making a travesty of the game. The umpire shall immediately call “Time” and declare the runner out." It is often said that it was passed because of Schaefer's thefts.
I literally cannot understand the problem here. It's not against the rules, it is a game state that is possible and even though unlikely, that means it does not involve a logical contradiction. I didn't think the incident was whacky, outrageous, goofy, funny, or puzzling. It just was. I saw it, and though "huh. let's see what happens next". I mean this thing, it *actually* happened, so it's not physically impossible, and I can *conceive* the condition to be possible under the game rules, so it's not logically impossible, and just because some software didn't test for this case, it doesn't mean it can't be done.
In fact, the simplest scoring software tracks the program by being reported to. I.e. Just tell it "someone is on second. that person is now on first". I know, because I wrote something like this in Qbasic when I was a kid. So don't tell me programmers heads exploded so much they can't figure out how to implement this condition. Do tell me that someone didn't bother to run tests to cover all possible conditions that can be generated if the game rules are allowed. Because THAT is what has happened here.
snooker, billards, darts, bowls, american bowling, ...
The way a baseball infield is designed , the home team dugout is aligned on the right side of the field with first and second base, the visiting team is aligned on the left side of the field with second and third base.
In MLB, there is no requirement for home vs away dugouts. The Brewers' home dugout is by first base. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugout_(baseball)#Teams_and_ballparks_with_home_dugouts_on_the_first_base_side
I dunno - he's on second....
Baseball software can't score what I did no Friday, either.
Sports is for jocks, the sworn enemy of nerds.
But stats are for nerds, and no game is as stat-happy as baseball.
And it is "Sports are for jocks," unless you are British, in which case, it would be "Sport is for jocks,".
Now playing sports (except as part of required PhysEd courses) or enjoying the experience might be exclusively for jocks. That point is arguable. Rules lawyering isn't for jocks (except Wookies, who always win), as any DnD player will testify.