baseball (Page 4)

It’s all in the POST season! – What’s the baseball post-season worth to a team?in money, that is? New research shows for each postseason win, the Philadelphia Phillies organization will receive approximately $2.5 million in revenue this year and $3.3 million in revenue next year. Each Tampa Bay win will bring in approximately $1 million this year and $1.4 million next year (since Tampa’s metro media market is smaller.)

Economists Charles Link and Dan Brown found that performing well in the postseason earns the team (and its media affiliates) much more money than a string of regular season wins. Link says, “This has important implications on player valuation and team building strategies.”

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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We know it’s a lefties game, but increasingly, it’s also a LATINO game. When Jackie Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947, his appearance shattered an 80-year baseball color line that segregated the game as a “white only” sport. Now, more than 60 years later, the number of black players has dwindled and players of Latino heritage have become a major force on the baseball diamond in the United States.
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A losing team might call this a conspiracy, but it’s really only science: while 90% of the human population is right-handed, in baseball 25% of the players, both pitchers, and hitters, are lefties. The game of baseball is actually designed to favor left-handed players.

Engineer David A. Peters says, “There is a premium on lefthanders for a number of reasons. For starters, take seeing the ball. A right-handed batter facing a right-handed pitcher actually has to pick up the ball visually as it comes from behind his (the batter’s) left shoulder. The left-handed batter facing the right-handed pitcher has the ball coming to him, so he has a much clearer view of pitches.”
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Physicists say that the newly extended baseball season, where teams play a total of 162 games, gives weaker teams an advantage. Meanwhile, psychologists are trying to figure out how successful hitters keep their eye on the ball.

In LiveScience.com, Andrea Thompson writes that while the top teams usually win the most games, weaker teams might come out ahead in the new, extended season. When physicists Eli Ben-Naim and Nick W. Hengartner ran game simulations through their computer at Los Alamos to test for ?statistical randomness,? they found that a weak team needs to play 256 more games to overcome their weaker player lineup.
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