Sports

My favorite summers were in middle school and early high school, when a few friends and I would monopolize three consecutive backyards to play a version of baseball with a pitcher, batter, and one or two fielders. We used tennis balls. Once our metal bats made it too easy to hit balls in the swamp, onto roofs, or over the tree line into the fourth consecutive backyard of the Harley’s1 we switched to a heavy wood bat I bought at a hardware store years prior. ...

What a great video. Destin is always captivating, and I enjoyed the crossover into one of my favorite sports. My only comment is near the end, where he takes issue with the terms “overstable” and “understable” to describe different disc flights. While it’s the opposite of what one might consider as stability for aerodynamics, it makes perfect sense in the context of the sport: an “overstable” disc is extremely stable in different wind conditions and forgiving of angles.

With the World Baseball Classic coming up, I pulled every baseball player in the Lahman Database whose name perfectly matches a country. Here are some simple statistics among the country representatives with a batting record. Country Name Total Hits Total Homers Total AB Batting Average AB/HR Jordan 5669 450 21717 .261 48.26 Chad 3854 384 15903 .242 41.41 Germany 2569 56 10346 .248 184.75 France 662 74 2514 .263 33.97 India 482 63 1905 .253 30.24 Chile 142 0 627 .226 NA Holland 127 3 618 .206 206.00 Jersey 111 2 727 .153 363.50 Portugal 89 2 450 .198 225.00 Poland 39 0 211 .185 NA Israel 33 6 132 .250 22.00 Monaco 2 0 13 .154 NA Ireland 1 0 7 .143 NA Ceylon 0 0 18 .000 NA Total 13780 1040 55188 .250 53.07 Here’s a fun bit of trivia about these Jordan folks: Until 1999, every player matching Jordan had it as their last name. Since 1999, all but two have the first name Jordan. ...

I first joined the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) as a student member around 2016. Back then, I only knew about SABR by the semi-eponymous term “Sabermetrics” that roughly refers to the growing list of statistics and measures used to evaluate baseball. I was studying math and dabbling in computer science with vague hopes and dreams that I could bring those interests to bear on the game I loved. I knew little else about the organization, so when I met some excellent members of the Halsey Hall chapter in Minnesota at TwinsFest that winter, I was a bit shocked to find them all rather old. Not that they couldn’t have been career statisticians or have other relevant skills to analyzing baseball, but I was an introverted college student and didn’t appreciate the interaction. ...

It comes down to extra innings and squandered opportunities, a year of firsts and not quite enough. Series were earned and given away, and the emotional pendulums of games were like rocket-propelled swing sets. ...

While the modern iteration of Amherst College’s baseball team is approaching three decades of minimal success in NCAA Division III, its origins date back over 165 years. That’s before John Smoltz was regularly announcing how much he hates baseball on national baseball broadcasts, before Nolan Ryan demonstrated the thrilling force of old man strength, before the Shot Heard Round the World, before the Iron Horse, before the Red Sox were cursed or Mordecai Brown lost the end of his index finger. The team began before rules were consistent.1 Starting at 11 in the morning on the “cool, clear, and bracing”2 day of July 1, 1859, Amherst faced Williams in the first recorded “Base Ball” game between two colleges. ...

Mark Armour has worked on his Satchel Paige Project for a few years. It’s an amazing feat of historical research about one of the most enigmatic characters and players in baseball history. It’s worth looking through regardless of your overall interest in baseball. If you’d like to hear a good conversation about the project, I suggest listening to episode 2352 of Effectively Wild, which is how I first learned about this work.

And it’s a potentially positive identity crisis. Throughout college, I ran two Turkey Trots in St. Paul, and two Goldy’s Runs at the UMN Twin Cities campus. None of those 5K races were completed without pauses to walk, and I don’t believe any of them were finished in faster than 35 minutes. I played baseball, which famously doesn’t involve much beyond sprinting. I never thought I’d catch this particular fitness bug. ...

I’m fairly confident all Major League Baseball players have gotten bigger over time, but I specifically decided to use the newest version of the Lahman Baseball Database to look at the average weight of catchers by the decade in which they debuted. Their listed weights are static so we can’t be certain what their debut weights were, but we’re looking at large trends. I also required any catcher in the list to have caught at least 200 career games. ...

I just updated my post answering a question from a coworker. It feels good to put that to rest.