Baseball Season

Baseball season is upon us. I can't wait. As much as I am a true geek and love the internet, I love baseball almost just as much. You see, I love math at the heart of things. Baseball, not many people know this, truly runs on math. Chaos theory and statistics, specifically.

What is chaos theory? In a nutshell, chaos theory is the art of taking disordered information (chaos) and finding the underlying order in that data. As anyone who has ever watched a baseball game with a die-hard fan will tell you, baseball is the perfect game for this discipline. Some teams, in fact, have utilized chaos theory to refine their approaches to play beyond the traditional athletic sectors. Oh, by the way, the Goldblum pic is from Jurassic Park, where he talk at length about Chaos Theory while trying not become raptor food. I hate having to explain that, but I realize that I'm a little esoteric sometimes.

For a more cogent look at this topic of statistics, I point you back to another fave program of mine, NPR. Stats are probably the most visible side of baseball. You hear them every time someone brings up the game. ERAs, IPs, Avgs., OB percents. All these things and many more are the metrics that people use to determine if a team/player is good in comparison to others in the league. It's a little cold and calculating, but it works.