After baseball’s offensive explosion of the late 1990s, Major League Baseball’s batters cooled off beginning in the 2001 season, and two university historians think they know why: a larger de facto strike zone beginning in 2001 and drug-testing (starting in 2003) in the major leagues.
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Catching a fly ball may look easy, but scientists know that it’s anything but: it turns out it’s the hardest hit to catch.
Researcher Ken Fuld became curious about this when his son began playing professional baseball. He says, “An outfielder is computing a collision course between the ball and the fielder in much the same way as a bird of prey tries to intercept another bird also in flight for its meal or an insect tries to contact a member of the opposite sex for the purpose of mating. Fielders must figure out the trajectory of the ball and combine that with information about their own movement in a way that requires a quick initial calculation of this information and then constant updating of information to correct for slight errors.”
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Now that the Superbowl is over and baseball season will arrive soon, a new study finds that switching to a new stadium can have a dramatically bad effect on a team’s performance, because it reduces players’ testosterone levels. “It’ll probably cost you a couple of points in a season, and in some sports, that’s the difference between winning and second place,” says statistician Richard Pollard.
He studied results of professional baseball, basketball and ice hockey games in the U.S. between 1987 and 2000 and found that teams that moved to new stadiums lost about 24% of their home advantage.
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Mathematician Bruce Bukiet, of the New Jersey Institute ofTechnology, has figured out something many coaches haven’t:how to have the perfect batting line-up. Baseball teamswould play better if coaches did away with the traditionalbatting line-up, he says. Putting the best batter second,rather than the fourth as is usually done, could improve ateam’s score. And the weakest hitter should not bat last.
If there are already players on base, a strong hitter has abetter chance of getting them back to home base. For thatreason, managers put the strongest players together in theline-up.
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