I saw 42 tonight. It's the new movie about Jackie Robinson's breakthrough with the 1946 Montreal Royals, and then with the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers as the first black player in modern Major League Baseball. The movie's a bit cheesy, redeemed mainly by the glorious story it recounts, and by a wonderful performance from Harrison Ford as Dodger General Manager Branch Rickey—the man who spearheaded baseball's integration. There are some nice touches, as when Rickey picks Robinson's bio out of a stack of Negro League player reports he's considering. "He's a Methodist," notes Rickey. "I'm a Methodist. God is a Methodist. It should work out well." Growing...

16 April, 2013

When Philip Humber of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game against the Seattle Mariners back in April, I wrote that the frequency of these exceedingly rare feats had ramped up dramatically over the last three decades. Mathematicians argued that speedup was more apparent than real, a classic example of a Poisson distribution. This is the natural tendency for exceptionally rare but random events to bunch up in ways that appear non-random. Humber's flawless game was the 19th in modern baseball's 112-year* history. Since April, there have been two more, including the 1-0 gem Félix Hernández of the Seattle Mariners pitched against the Tampa Bay Rays...

16 August, 2012

Contrarian reader Andrew Douglas makes the obvious point that there are a lot more Major League Baseball games nowadays than there were in the first six decades of the 20th Century, and they play a slightly longer season. That can account for some—but probably not all—of the recent flurry of these exceptionally rare events that I remarked on yesterday. From 1901 through 1960, with minor variations, 16 teams played 154 games per season, for a total of 1,232 games per year (16 x 154 ÷ 2). In 1961, the season was lengthened to 162 games, an increase of about five percent. Baseball...

23 April, 2012

Philip Humber of the Chicago White Sox pitched a perfect game against the Seattle Mariners yesterday. He faced only 27 batters, and got them all out. It's an exceedingly rare feat—Humber's was only the 19th in modern Major League Baseball history—but not as rare as it used to be. Or is it? (Click on the chart to view a full-sized version.) In the first 60 years after the turn of the 20th Century, only four major-leaguers  managed to pitch perfect games; 15 have done it in the 62 years since. It sure looks as if pitching a perfect game got easier around 1980,...

22 April, 2012

Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio faces Cleveland fastballer Bob Feller, who died Wednesday. “I don’t think anyone is ever going to throw a ball faster than he does,” DiMaggio predicted. Feller was a 17-year-old high school student when he pitched his first game for the Indians and struck out 15 batters. Three weeks later he struck out 17, tying Dizzy Dean's Major League record. "By the end of his brief rookie season," the New York Times reports, "Feller was the best-known young person in America, with the possible exception of Shirley Temple." In 1937, with his picture on the cover of Time, he opened his first...

16 December, 2010

Please don't think me old, but I grew up in a suburb of New York City, listening to Vin Scully call Brooklyn Dodger games on a radio the size of a bread box, powered by vacuum tubes. The experience was formative in the sense that it left me with the belief baseball games are best seen on the radio, in singer Terry Cashman's evocative phrase. Tonight at 10, I set out from Sydney, Nova Scotia, for the 75 km. drive to my home on a remote stretch of Cape Breton's Bras d'Or Lakes. Before pulling out of the parking lot, I plugged...

29 October, 2010

When Fordham Rams pinch hitter Brian Kownacki rounded third and headed for home on Chris Walker's eighth inning double last Wednesday, Iona Gaels catcher James Beck was waiting at the plate with the ball. Kownacki looked like a dead dunk, until...

24 April, 2010

It's an old debate: Does the curveball really bend, or is it just an illusion, like the river that runs uphill at Marshy Hope? Both says Arthur Shapiro, Associate Professor of Psychology at American University in Washington DC. Shapiro's demonstration of the illusory component won the Neural Correlate Society's Best Illusion of the Year Contest. In the game of baseball, a pitcher stands on a mound and throws a 2.9-inch diameter ball in the direction of home plate. The pitcher creates different types of pitches by releasing the ball at different velocities and with different spins. A typical major league “curveball”...

24 June, 2009