Archive for category sports

Major League Baseball’s grand-slam experiment to pick up its pace

It’s Opening Day today for Major League Baseball (MLB), when hopes for a championship season hit a peak before reality sets in for most of our teams. Excitement runs higher than usual this year because trial runs at lower levels emboldened Major League Baseball (MLB) into implementing drastic rule changes aimed at speeding up the game. The biggest impacts will come from a new pitch clock, a ban on the infield shift and limits on pickoff throws.

Results from MLB’s spring training—wrapping up this weekend—look very promising: The average time per game dropped to about 2.5 hours—down 26 minutes from last year. That will keep me, a Minnesota Twins season-ticket holder, in the game—no more bailing out in the later innings and listening to the finish on the radio during my half-hour drive home from Target Field.

Another likely effect of the MLB rule changes will be more attempts to steal bases, increased this spring by almost 50% from 2.1 to 3.1 per 100 plate appearances with a success rate of 77.2 percent—up from year’s 71.3.* Let’s go!

These new rules for 2023 augment one adopted in 2020 to limit overtime games—the placement of a “ghost runner” at second base beginning in the 10th inning. The October issues of Significance magazine** reports remarkable agreement of actual results versus predictions generated by a natural experiment on this rule—a reduction of about 15 minutes per game. Even better!

“This is the game we all want to see — get the ball, pitch the ball, keep the defense on their toes.”

Actor Bryan Cranston speaking on behalf of MLB

PS It’s hard to argue with the efficacy of natural experiments based on this MLB example and the methodology being awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.*** However, if at all possible from an ethical, practical and political perspective, a planned experiment laid out in randomized fashion remains the ‘gold standard’ for predictive modeling. Why not take over a baseball league or a specific team, preferably the lowest level possible, and run a designed experiment? I did so successfully for my softball squad. See how and the results in this 2007 StatsMadeEasy blog.

*Statistics on game time and stolen bases from Tyler Kepner, The New York Times, 2023 MLB Season Preview, 3/27/23.

**“Baseball’s natural experiment,” Lee Kennedy-Shaffer.

***Natural experiments help answer important questions

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Major League Baseball goes all in for humidors to dampen homeruns

As I reported back in 2018 in my blog on Boffins baffled by baseballs being bashed beyond ballpark borders, MLB experimentally imposed humidors in select stadiums with high rates of home runs, such as Coors Field in Denver and Chase Field in Phoenix. The moistening evidently worked well enough* to make humidors mandatory for all teams, including my home-town squad—the Minnesota Twins, this season.

Perhaps the humidors will dampen down the homers a bit, at least in the drier climates of Denver, Phoenix and the like. But, despite dealing with the reduced coefficient of restitution (?), our “Bombas” blasted 6 round-trippers on Sunday at Target Field in Minneapolis. So, I am skeptical (though happy for my Twins).

This will not be a big deal in most parks but the most humid parks (San Francisco, San Diego, Miami, Tampa Bay) may get an offensive boost as the humidors will dry the balls out a little.

Eno Saris, baseball analytics writer for The Athletic, Mar 25, 2022 tweet

I suggest that MLB try deadening bats to further reduce home runs. This worked well for the Little League—reducing homers by 70%.** The trick will be working out a way to do it with wood. Going to plastic and/or metal would be ruinous for the Grand Old Game.

In any case, it would be great to see MLB get back to fast moving shorter games. Though home runs are exciting, they do not balance off the boring plethora of strikeouts and the inaction of the 7 position players.

*For the statistics, see this Hardball Times April 26, 2019 blog by David Kagan on The Physics of Humidors: A Second Case Study at Chase Field.

** “Little League Slows the Home Run Revolution”, Wall Street Journal, Amanda Christovich, 4/19/19.

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Banging my head against the wall about concussions in football

Being a big fan of football at all levels—grade school (oldest grandson Archer, pictured, going good on the gridiron), high school, college (season-ticket holder for Golden Gophers) and NFL (long-suffering Vikings fan), I hate to see players going down with concussions and their long-term effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). I suffered several sports-related concussions myself, which makes me even more keen to see advancements in their prevention. Therefore, I was excited to see this report by ESPN on soft-shelled helmets being tested by NFL players.

Unfortunately, however, the statistics on impact reduction, less than 10%, do not appear to warrant putting on a comically squishy covering over a hard-shell football helmet. The advantage is just too marginal. On the other hand, when doing anything involving an appreciable risk without a helmet, for example, riding a bicycle, wearing one becomes essential for concussion reduction. According to this 2017 article in the Journal of Neurosurgery on helmet efficacy they provide significant protection against “devastating intracranial injury”—skull fractures and the like.

Therefore, I am pleased that, unlike most of his teammates, Archer wears his unglamorous helmet.

However, the bad news from neuroscientists is that helmets are “not efficacious” for protection against concussions.

Heads up!

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Flipping out with frisbees

This weekend I enjoyed a nine-hole round of disc golf—a great way to enliven an outdoor walk via some friendly competition and the satisfying clink of chains when making a shot.

The trick is to control the pitch of the aerodynamic platters. They must be thrown at an angle that better players than me, such as my oldest son Ben, refer to as ‘hyzers’ or ‘anhyzers’. I am not quite sure which is which. All I can think of when he tries to explain the difference is that I really need a six pack of Anheuser-Busch beer when my anhyzer throw goes off into a bush, which happens far too often.

Check out this greatest shot (an anhyzer?) in disc golf history by World Champion James Conrad earlier this month.

Getting back to beer, this recent report by Ars Technica provides a ‘heads-up’ on why coasters fly so poorly—flipping on average only a half second into their flight. See all the details in Beer Mats make bad Frisbees published by three German physicists last month. Evidently “the crucial effect responsible for the flipping is found to be the lift attacking not in the center of mass but slightly offset to the forward edge”, which “induces a torque leading to a precession towards backspin orientation.”  Now you know!  It’s not that you are drinking too much due to being quarantined too long during the pandemic.  Whew!

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Archer’s Big Bounce Experiment

I am a big fan of University of Minnesota Athletics—even more so now after they sponsored a Science of Basketball project for grade schoolers. My 9-year-old grandson Archer jumped at the chance to put a variety of basketballs to the test with my help. For the results, see the video we submitted to the UMn judges.

Archer’s findings–wood being better than rubber for bounce–stand out in graphics generated with Design-Expert software.

Archer enjoyed doing this science project. I feel sure it helped him understand what it takes to design an experiment, do it properly and analyze the result. My only disappointment is that the high-tech cell-phone app for measuring height, which I used for my experiment on elastic spheres, failed due to too much echo in the gym, most likely.

However, I discovered another intriguing basketball-physics experiment at the Science Buddies STEM website. It determines where a bouncing ball’s energy goes . This requires deployment of an infrared-temperature gun with a laser beam. Awesome! Archer will like that (if he can wrestle the laser gun away from me).

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Major League Baseball experimenting with robot umpires

After a somewhat successful* year-long trial of automated balls and strikes (ABS) in the Atlantic League, MLB will bring in these ‘robots’ to second-guess their human umpires at nine of Florida’s spring-training games. The ABS system makes use of TrackMan radar technology, already in play for StatCast.

After MLB’s tech-team improves ABS’s reliability and accuracy, it might be worth using, but only if it speeds up the game. Using ABS simply to challenge calls will just make things worse, while eliminating the spectacle of on-field blow-ups by volatile managers like Billy Martin (former Minnesota Twin). When the calls are made by invisible radar, who do you throw the dirt at?

“You turn back (to the umpire and say), ‘TrackMan?’ They say, ‘Yeah,'” “‘Well, I’m not going to argue with you.’ Because it’s the robots.”

Southern Maryland Blue Crabs outfielder Tony Thomas commenting on the experimental use of ABS in the Atlantic League

PS. When the baseball robots get smart enough to call balks, then we’d all best bunker down for them taking over the world.

*Baseball America reporting Imperfections And All, Robo Umps Make Significant Impact

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Boffins baffled by baseballs being bashed beyond ballpark borders




On May 24, Major League Baseball released this scientific report on a puzzling increase–nearly 50%–in home runs from 0.86 to 1.26 per game over the last three years (2014-17).

A panel of 10 experts, including math and stats professors as well as PhDs in physics, saw nothing changed in the properties of the baseballs—size, weight, seam height, and COR (coefficient of restitution—a measure of the ball’s “bounciness”). However, they did observe a reduction in drag, an aerodynamic phenomenon that may be due to the rubber pill being more centered and thus causing the ball to stay rounder while spinning in flight. This is a very impressive explanation. But, if I were an umpire for this study, I’d call these fellows out.

Based on the results of this study, the Commissioner will, among other things, consider adding humidors to all stadiums to keep the baseballs under more controlled storage conditions, and create standards for mud rubbing. It seems that he’s getting seriously down and dirty on home runs.

I tip my ball cap to such marvelous frivolity for application of science and statistics, flavored with a fillip of voodoo. What a game!

“We do admit that we do not understand this.”

– Study Chairman Alan Nathan, Professor of Physics Emeritus, University of Illinois.

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Patriots make a mockery of 249 to 1 odds against them




Check out this Super Bowl win probability chart by ESPN Stats & Info.  It remains bottomed out at an Atlanta Falcons victory from halftime on to the end of regulation, after which the Patriots ultimately prevail.  When New England settled for a field goal to cut their deficit to 16 points (28-to-12), the ESPN algorithm registered a 0.4% probability for them to win, being 9 minutes and 44 seconds left in the game.  That computes to 249 to 1 odds against a Patriot victory. Ha!

I am not terribly surprised that a team could overcome such odds.  The reason is that on December 29, 2006 I attended the Insight bowl in Tempe, Arizona where the Red Raiders of Texas, after falling behind 38-7 with 7:47 remaining in the third quarter, rallied to score 31 unanswered points and ultimately defeat my Gophers in overtime.  At the time it was the greatest comeback of all time in a bowl game, matched only after another decade passed with the 2016 Alamo Bowl victory by the TCU Horned Frogs, who trailed the Oregon Ducks 0-31 at halftime.  But they had more time than the Gophers to throw away their sure victory.  I entered our 2006 chances of victory in this football win probability calculator.  It says 100.00% that Minnesota must win.  Ha!

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

– Edward Gibbon

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The most useless sports stat I’ve seen yet




When Minnesota Twin Trevor Plouffe came up to bat last night at Target Field they flashed this totally irrelevant stat up on the scoreboard: “Through July Plouffe is the only Major Leaguer to have at least 35 at bats vs 1 team.”   I wondered how anyone can come up with such obscure information.  This XKCD cartoon explains it.

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My Minnesota Twins fail on fantasy front




Supposedly hope springs eternal at the start of every baseball season, no matter how miserable the prospects for your home team.  Sadly the statisticians at the Wall Street Journal burst that bubble by skewering my squad—saying yesterday that It’s Not a Fantasy, the Minnesota Twins Are Bad.  Their “Roster Reality” ranking leaves the hapless Twinkies last. Fantasy team owners figured only 3 players rated a position in the first 276 drafted. That is bad.

Being a homer, when I did my draft I filled my last position with Byron Buxton—the number 1 prospect in all of Major League Baseball.  Unfortunately if BB does make it up to Minnesota this year it will be after the Twins get eliminated from contention.  On the bright side I expect that will again happen with plenty of games remaining to let the up-and-comers get in some good playing time.

By the way, the Twins rallied this afternoon with 2 runs in the 9th to win out over the hated White Sox and prevent them from a 3 game sweep.  That’s a 1 game winning streak!  Woohoo!

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