Martin’s Blog

I went up to Phoenix last night with the following motley crew of math(s) grad students to see a baseball game – the Arizona Diamondbacks against the Chicago Cubs.

 We drove about two hours through the desert wasteland and then a short distance throught the urban wasteland of Phoenix (the 5th biggest city in the US but it barely has a city centre). Phoenix is even hotter than Tucson, due to being at a significantly lower altitude and being built entirely out of concrete.

The stadium itself is a pretty amazing structure  with a fully retractable roof and some impressive air conditioning. It also has a pool in deep right field. We were sitting in the top tier just to the left of the foul line next to right field (just back and right of the boundaries of the photo below).

As befits mathematicians attending the sport with the most statistics in the world (both in number of different things measured and sheer volume of data – there are over 2,400 games played in the regular season), one of our number brought along a scorebook. This introduced me to the rather subjective world of baseball scoring – if the second baseman dives to get a ground ball and then a base runner knocks the ball out of his glove should that be scored as a hit to the batter or an error from the fielder?

The game itself was fairly low scoring (a pitching duel as it is called). The cubs scored two in the first inning, but then the Arizona pitcher hit a home run in the second inning. Everybody though this was quite exciting – as in cricket the pitchers generally have much lower batting averages than the batsman/position players (something like 0.100 compared to 0.300). But Arizona’s starting pitcher on the night was a shortstop in college and is actually quite a good hitter.

Sidenote: Arizona plays in the National League (Major League baseball is split up into  the National League and the American League). In the American League the Designated Hitter rule is in effect so pitchers almost never bat. Im already convinced that the Designated Hitter rule is terrible – it robs us of the equivalent of watching Glenn McGrath bat.

After this the Cubs scored one run in the 6th to take the score to 3-1 going into the 9th and final inning. There were some nice double plays and bases stolen etc. – the afficianados particularly enjoyed a runner being picked off at home when the infield was playing back. At one point there was an altercation between the umpire and a player about the strike zone but disappointingly this didn’t degenerate into a bench clearing brawl.

In the top of the 9th the Cubs piled on three runs. The Diamondbacks pulled one back and had runners on first and second but one final fly ball to the infield finished the game.

We had some interesting discussions about the rules. Here are some of the less obvious ones:

- There are highly complicated rules that prevent the pitcher bawking the batter/runners. If you are the pitcher and have your foot on the rubber then touching your mouth with your hand, swivelling your neck too much, throwing a pitch without waiting for a beat in the position etc will give all the runners a base.

- If there is a runner on first and a fly ball is hit into the infield then it automatically counts as being caught. This is to prevent the fielding team letting it bounce to attempt the double play.

- If a ball leaves the field on the bounce then it advances all runners by two bases.

 Overall, baseball is not as good as cricket but it’s still fun and it has the advantage of being on whenever you turn on the TV.

I have now watched about 2.5 games of baseball and am starting to see some of its appeal.

However what I am most excited about is the Little League World Series. I watched the ESPN broadcast of the Arizona team beating the Southern California team to qualify for the world series in Williamstown next week.

This featured 12 year olds who were throwing 70 mph fastballs, beautiful curveballs and generally looked about as good as professionals (except the catchers weren’t very good for some reason). The pitchers mound is 40 yards from the batter for little league instead of 60 for the pros so there is actually about the same reaction time for the batter.

It was brilliant: the kids looked really serious, the coaches were mostly former professionals, huge crowd. There are a few concessions to childhood – a pitcher is only allowed 85 pitches a game and every player has to have at least one at-bat and three defensive outs.

If you are not convinced how serious this is consider the scandal of Dannygate.