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Rocket Science vs. Barry Bonds 285

Posted by timothy from the baseball-fans-love-links-and-stats dept.
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."
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Rocket Science vs. Barry Bonds More

Rocket Science vs. Barry Bonds

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  • Well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheKidWho ( 705796 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:34PM (#8843208)
    All this talk about projectile motion is making me itch to play a game of grand theft auto

  • MIT Grads (Score:4, Funny)

    by jazman_777 ( 44742 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:35PM (#8843221) Homepage
    ...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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by PepsiProgrammer ( 545828 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:36PM (#8843231)
      One might say Bonds fought he law, and the law won.

  • What? You want a Prada? (Score:4, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:38PM (#8843242)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by name773 ( 696972 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:39PM (#8843251)
    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!

  • There is a future in Baseball for Geeks (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pave Low ( 566880 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:39PM (#8843253) Journal
    and it's not on the field. It's in the front office.

    The generation of Moneyball [amazon.com] 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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spindizzy ( 34680 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:39PM (#8843255)
    "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.

  • How embarrassing... (Score:5, Funny)

    by FrYGuY101 ( 770432 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:41PM (#8843269) Journal
    Everquest players caught playing baseball... how tragic!

  • Curt Schilling, -NOT- a HOF'er. (Score:3, Informative)

    by dameron ( 307970 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:42PM (#8843280)
    Not really even close. He's 37 and has 164 wins. Ain't gonna happen.

    -dameron

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Curt Schilling, -NOT- a HOF'er. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kalidasa ( 577403 ) * on Monday April 12, 2004 @09:11PM (#8843457) Journal
      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.

      • Re:Curt Schilling, -NOT- a HOF'er. (Score:2, Interesting)

        by 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.
    • Baseball Reference's Hall of Fame Monitor [baseball-reference.com] has him at 127 points already; no eligible pitcher of the modern era with more than 130 points is not in the Hall of Fame (well, Lee Smith, with 136 points, isn't in yet, but it's a fair bet that he'll get in before his eligibility is up, and he's a reliever anyway).

      His score of 33 on the Black Ink Test [baseball-reference.com] puts him in the company of Juan Marichal (34), Three Finger Brown (35) and Old Hoss Radbourn (35); once again, every eligible pitcher of the modern era with a B

  • What? (Score:4, Funny)

    by greygent ( 523713 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:47PM (#8843304) Homepage
    What's the mathematical symbol for steroids and how would you represent it in your equation?

  • Like my father used to say (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:51PM (#8843330)
    There's no crying in math.

  • o_O (Score:5, Funny)

    by TechnologyX ( 743745 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @08:52PM (#8843342) Journal
    Slashdot... sports? You do realize that would involve getting up and moving right?

    • Re:o_O (Score:4, Funny)

      by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @09:05PM (#8843411)
      Slashdot... sports? You do realize that would involve getting up and moving right?

      Baseball... moving? You do realize that most of baseball involves sitting still on a bench, or standing still in a field, right?

      (sorry baseball fans who will now start flaming me:)

      • Re:o_O (Score:2)

        by clem ( 5683 )
        Baseball... moving? You do realize that most of baseball involves sitting still on a bench, or standing still in a field, right?

        Don't forget all the adjusting of atheletic supporters.
  • Hello, what about Bill James [wikipedia.org]?!?

  • Yeah, Whatever (Score:2, Funny)

    by dupper ( 470576 ) *
    Call me when an MIT grad makes the NFL.

    • Re:Yeah, Whatever (Score:2, Informative)

      by Em Emalb ( 452530 ) *
      Harvard good enough for you?

      From Harvard's own website:

      Harvard football has seen a tremendous resurgence in the number of graduates who have gone onto the professional ranks. Over the past four years, seven Crimson players have been drafted or signed professional contracts and six remain active heading into the 2001 season. Among them is Matt Birk '98, the starting center for the Minnesota Vikings who was named to the NFL's 2000 All-Pro Team.

      This past April, Mike Clare 01, a First Team All-America at of
    • Or, to take an example from a 'real' sport - Dr Ron Karnough who won the 200im at div NCAA's the year he graduated with a an MD (Orthoscopic sugery). Sure there's lots of 'smart jocks' but how many of them have performed at a world top10 level, in a loy 'paying' sport with in & out of season drug testing to boot, through the process of obtaining an MD? Oh - and I do have a baseball tie in, for those patient enough to read the whole article [swiminfo.com]

  • But wait... (Score:5, Funny)

    by re-Verse ( 121709 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @09:02PM (#8843394) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • You simply must hit the williard into some cilium with your fracaman. And remeber: it doesn't matter who wins. It matters who wins three times in a row. Tally ho!

  • I love baseball.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by erick99 ( 743982 ) * <homerun@gmail.com> on Monday April 12, 2004 @09:08PM (#8843439)
    ..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

    • Re:I love baseball.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Omerna ( 241397 )
      Just FYI, if you think about it the infield fly rule makes perfect sense... it was developed because before it was institued EVERY pop fly in the infield resulted in a double play (in the situations in which it applies). This is because the base runners never knew if the infielders would catch the ball or let it drop. No matter what happened-- whether the ball was caught and a runner doubled up or the ball wasn't caught and there would be an easy double play-- there WOULD BE a double play. Now you only get

  • Doug Glanville is THE alpha baseball geek (Score:5, Interesting)

    by UVABlows ( 183953 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @09:14PM (#8843471)
    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 [go.com]
    Astronomy club - http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=177197 8 [go.com]

    • What about Curt? (Score:4, Informative)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @10:17PM (#8843811)
      The guy that Schilling played everquest with, Doug Glanville has got to be the reigning baseball alpha geek

      How about Curt Schilling himself, who carries a powerbook on the road and has quicktime clips and a database of hundreds of batters?

      Reportedly he also spent time on a famous red sox chat board the night before he signed with the sox, trying to make up his mind whether he should sign...and convince everyone he really was Curt Schilling(he managed to, after instantly returning questions on his career stats that, according to friends, would have taken a "good baseball researcher" at least 5-10 minutes to find).

      He finished up VERY late that night(well, morning) by saying essentially "Thanks, I've decided to sign with the sox, I've always heard red sox fans were the most knowledgeable, you guys have proved it". A few hours later(heh) at the press conference, John Henry(who also logged in at one point) joked(along the lines of) "and in Curt's contract is a clause prohibiting him from staying up past midnight talking on internet chat boards the day before a game."

    • Hehe, very nice find. Got any more articles? That's awesome that this guy is in to online gaming, amateur astronomy, travel, etc... he's like me but more athletic! Also black. Suddenly I don't think baseball is so bad.
  • baseball has always had the highest Geek Quotient of any major sport.

    I'd say auto racing, with it's high degree of computerization, engineers/designers or mechanics, and use of the grand-daddy of geekdom - radios, would rate as high or higher.

  • A geek attempts to interpret baseball (Score:5, Funny)

    by SnappingTurtle ( 688331 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @09:44PM (#8843658) Homepage
    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.

  • Okay, Bonds hit a home run off him, but did he really have to kick sand in his face afterwards?

  • "How about a good old-fashioned Sports story? (Score:4, Funny)

    by brianc ( 11901 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @10:11PM (#8843783)
    What is this Sports of which you speak?

  • It ain't just the players. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by endquotedotcom ( 557632 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @10:26PM (#8843886) Homepage
    The Seattle Weekly just did cover story [seattleweekly.com] 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.
  • If you are even remotely interested in the game, I'd recommend reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis. It's essentially about how the Oakland A's managed to make the playoffs with next the to lowest payroll in the major leagues. All sorts of geeky stuff in it...check it out.
  • to play American football at the professional level, you have to be thinking every second. You not only have all of those different plays to memorize, you have to know where you are in relation to the rest of your teammates. The guys who play on the line have a particularly difficult job, because they're grappling with 300lb.+ opponents while reacting to the play around them.

    I think baseball *seems* complex because it's actually fairly easy to observe the nuances of the game while you're watching. You can

    • Re:Baseball may have highest Geek Quotient, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ray Radlein ( 711289 ) on Monday April 12, 2004 @11:21PM (#8844259) Homepage
      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... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alouts ( 446764 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2004 @12:38AM (#8844712)
    ... 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!

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