THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Saturday, October 31, 2009

How you can get into a dumb argument when the facts are not articulated well…

Who knows what the real facts are when you read an article (the author can say anything he wants, and often does, and hence obfuscates the truth), but you should read this article for your amusement.

Here are the (amusing) highlights:

“Physically, there is no such thing as a breaking curveball,” said Zhong-Lin Lu, who holds the William M. Keck Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. “It’s mostly in the hitter’s mind.”

First he says, “there is no such thing..., which means unequivocably that a curveball does not break.  There is no ambiguity there unless you want to argue about the meaning of the word “breaking.” He says, “No such thing.” Period.

Then he says, “It is mostly in the hitter’s mind.” Well, that sentence is not congruent with the first one.  If the first one is true, the second one has to say, “It is completely in the hitter’s mind,” and not “mostly”.  By saying “mostly” he HAS to mean that there is SOME break to a curve ball.

Again, we don’t know if the scientist was quoted correctly, or out of context perhaps, but what he is saying cannot make any sense.  Sort of like if I say, “Getting struck by lightning is extremely rare, therefore if someone says that they got struck by lightning, they are definitely and completely out of their mind.” Makes no sense.

Plus, we KNOW that curve balls break. Unless a scientist is a complete whack job, he is not going to say that curve balls don’t break (unless of course, he has some definition of “break” that is not what we are used to).

Then again, the entire confusion is cleared up when he says (according to the author):

According to Lu, who helped to design a popular Web animation that illustrates the science behind what he calls the curveball illusion, the ball travels relatively straight toward the batter, curving somewhat but not nearly as much as claimed.

So pretty much what we would have guessed.  Curve balls DO break (as we KNOW), but just not as much as some people think (I’m not sure what that even means since I don’t know too many people who could attach a number to the “break” of a curve ball even if they wanted to), AND there is some degree of an optimal illusion such that batters think they break more than they do. That last part makes sense I guess. At least there is no reason to think it is not true.  Batters think that curve balls break more than they do, but they do break.  O.K.  No big deal.

So, if in fact the scientist said this, which the article claims he did:

“Physically, there is no such thing as a breaking curveball”

That is simply not true.  The second part of what he supposedly said, “It’s mostly in the hitter’s mind,” is true, however, depending on your definition of “mostly” of course.  He could have said “at least partly” or something like that unless he measured the break and it was like 6” but when you ask a batter they say like, “3 feet.” Then I guess you can say “mostly.” But that is not important.

Now, the amusing part of the whole article, and in fact the thesis of the article, is this:

(Remember that the scientist says that curve balls do in fact break (at least later in the article), but that a batter thinks it breaks more than it really does because of optical illusions created by spin and peripheral vision or some such thing.

As elegant as Lu’s graphic is, not everyone agrees with him, including former star Major League Baseball pitcher Mike Marshall.

“I can’t believe the guy is saying something that was disproved almost 50 years ago,” said Marshall, of Florida, who won a Cy Young Award, baseball’s highest pitching honor, in 1974. “It’s absolutely ridiculous.”

WTF?