In response to the Rockies Mattpen (Matts Belisle, Daley, Lindstrom and Reynolds), Abbott and Costello recently performed a new act.

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Back by popular demand, it's Abbott and Costello.

 

Abbott: Well Costello, I’m going to Colorado with you. You know Jim Tracy, the Rockies’ manager, gave me a job as coach for as long as you’re on the team.

Costello: Look Abbott, if you’re the coach, you must know all the players.

Abbott: I certainly do.

Costello: Well you know I’ve never met the guys. So you’ll have to tell me their names, and then I’ll know who’s playing on the team.

Abbott: Oh, I’ll tell you their names, but you know it seems to me they give these athletes now-a-days very peculiar names.

Costello: You mean funny names?

Abbott: Strange names, pet names…like D’Brickashaw Ferguson… or Dizzy Dean…

Costello: His brother Daffy.

Abbott: Daffy Dean…

Costello: And their French cousin.

Abbott: French?

Costello: Goofè.

Abbott: Goofè Dean. Well, let’s see, we have the pen… Matts out there.
 
Costello: Who else?

Abbott: Matts.

Costello: Are you the manager?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: You gonna be the coach too?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: And you don’t know the fellows’ names?

Abbott: Well I should.

Costello: Well then, the bullpen is Matt… and?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: I mean the fellow’s name.

Abbott: Matt.

Costello: And?

Abbott: Matt.

Costello: And?

Abbott: Matt.

Costello: The guy pitching…

Abbott: Matts in the pen!

Costello: I’m asking YOU who’s in the pen other than Matt?

Abbott: That’s the name of our ’pen.

Costello: Matt?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: Well go ahead and tell me the others.

Abbott: That’s it.

Costello: Matt?

Abbott: Yes.

PAUSE

Costello: Look, you got more than one member of the ’pen?

Abbott: Certainly.

Costello: You have Matt in the ’pen?

Abbott: That’s right.

Costello: When you pay off the ’pen every month, Matt gets the money?

Abbott: Every dollar of it.

Costello: All I’m trying to find out is the fellow’s name who pitches the late innings.

Abbott: Matt.

Costello: The 6th.

Abbott: That’s it.

Costello: Matt gets the money for the ’pen and pitches the 6th?

Abbott: He does, every dollar. And then Matt will pitch the 7th.

Costello: Matt?

Abbott: Yes.

PAUSE

Abbott: What’swrong with that?

Costello: Look, all I wanna know is when you need a guy for a quick out against a lefty who do you pitch?

Abbott: Matt.

Costello: And the 8th?

Abbott: Matt.

Costello: How does he pitch…

Abbott: Well, usually. That's why he goes in the later innings.

Costello: Matt?

Abbott: Yes.

PAUSE

Costello: All I’m trying to find out is if Matt pitches only the 6th.

Abbott: No. Matts pitch in the 7th and 8th too.

Costello: I’m not asking you about the 7th and 8th.

Abbott: Matts pitch the 6th through 8th.

Costello: Matt piches more than one inning?

Abbott: Not usually.

Costello: But Matt pitches in the 7th and 8th?

Abbott: And the 6th.

Costello: One inning at a time!

Abbott: Well, don’t matter.

Costello: But you can’t throw Matt every day!

Abbott: Take it easy, buddy. No one goes every day.

Costello: I’m only asking you, who pitches the 6th?

Abbott: Matt.

Costello: Ok.

Abbott: All right.

PAUSE

Costello: Matt pitches 1 inning at a time?

Abbott: Yes, in the 6th through 8th.

Costello: I’m not asking you about the 8th.

Abbott: Sure you are…

Costello: Matt pitches the 6th.

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: Then Matt takes the rest of the night off and Matt throws the 7th.

Abbott: That’s it.

Costello: So what if Matt needs a day off?

Abbott: Which?

Costello: Any of them? Why does it matter? Maybe it's a religious holiday.

Abbott: Oh, that's our old leftfielder, he isn't here anymore.

Costello: Who?

Abbott: Matt. Traded him for CarGo.

Costello: Cargo? But Matt is in our 'pen?

Abbott: Yeah. Matts in the 'pen.

Costello: Yet you traded Matt for some kind of goods and he doesn't play here anymore.

Abbott: Yes, we traded Matt for CarGo. He wasn't going to resign, thought our offer wasn't high enough.

Costello: So Matt is gone? Traded because you assumed he would leave in free agency?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: Your offer was too low?

Abbott: No, he's going to be our shortstop for years to come and we wouldn't trade him. We offered Matt.

Costello: Matt was a shortstop?

Abbott: No Matt was a third baseman we converted to leftfield.

Costello: But I thought Matt pitched in the bullpen.

Abbott: He does.

Costello: So you converted him again?

Abbott: No, Matts always pitched, at least since we got 'em.

PAUSE

Costello: So your bullpen is Matt, he only pitches 1 inning at a time and Matt throws the 6th 7th and 8th. Matt used to play left field but has been traded for CarGo and you wouldn't trade the non-Matt shortstop. I give up, I don’t give a darn anymore! If you can't even tell me even the players names, we're doomed.

Abbott: Oh, that's our catcher.

Over the past two seasons Carlos Gonzalez has demonstrated an impressive control of some advanced technology while terrorizing opposing MLB teams and players. To date, MLB has allowed the continued use of his LAZOR and its associated powers and applications. Due to this unforeseen and unprecedented acceptance of new, game-changing technologies by MLB, the Rockies have gained a significant advantage over their competition since their acquisition of Carlos Gonzalez prior to the 2009 season. It is suspected that this winter MLB informed the Rockies that Carlos and his LAZOR will continue to be allowed to usher in a new era of baseball. These promises lead to his contract extension, ensuring that the Colorado Rockies will have a technological edge on their opponents for years to come.

LAZOR is a synonym for LASER, which is an abbreviation for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. In 1917, Albert Einstein established the theoretic foundations for the laser in the paper Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung (On the Quantum Theory of Radiation). [Wikipedia] However, it wasn’t until 1960 that the first functioning laser was constructed at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. Since then, lasers of many types and sizes have been developed for a great range of applications.

In this article, we will attempt to identify the type of LAZOR Carlos Gonzalez has accessed and utilized repeatedly for the Rockies by identifying three characteristics: spectrum, power, and size. First, we will need to find an example of its use in a game. For this, I feel a perfect example was an interleague matchup in 2009. Below, we can see Carlos field a ball hit off the outfield wall, turn, and unleash his LAZOR upon the unsuspecting Oakland Athletics.

Figure 1. Devastating.

Note: Despite the gruesome nature of the injuries sustained in this example, Jason Giambi went on to lead a relatively normal life, although some still find it unbearable to witness him (in a Rockies uniform).

As you can see, the LAZOR is in the visible spectrum (please forgive the pun), more specifically it is between 440 and 480 nm in wavelength and continuous (CW). This narrows the field of possibilities greatly, as many lasers operate outside this range. However, there are still several types of lasers to choose from.

This LAZOR is also obviously very high powered, as Carlos has demonstrated several times. This does help to reduce the number of possibilities. As this laser was able to set fire and ablate skin, it had to be able to provide an energy density greater than 3 Joules per square centimeter. Assuming the size of this beam was about a six foot diameter circle at the range shown above, the ignition occurred almost instantaneously (~ within 1/1000th of a second), and a negligible amount of energy was lost to atmospheric absorption, the total power of the LAZOR is no less than 10.9 MW. Unfortunately, no known lasers are capable of outputting this type of power in this wavelength, especially from a compact, portable source. Carlos Gonzalez has obviously acquired a new technology. This does make sense, given that he is the only person in MLB utilizing it. 

So where did he get this LAZOR? The only reasonable answer is that he got it from aliens. Looking at his minor league stats, he clearly broke out in 2009 while at Colorado Springs, posting career highs across the board in his batting statistics, and further bolstering an already very strong defensive reputation. This was after a disappointing 2008 in Oakland, and perhaps he realized he needed help to excel at the MLB level. The 2009 Sky Sox visited the Las Vegas 51’s on their first road trip of the season, and obviously during this road trip Carlos Gonzalez was able to enter Area 51 and retrieve the long lost LAZOR weapon system from the infamous 1947 alien crash landing.

In conclusion, Carlos Gonzalez is clearly in possession of alien technology and has been using it for the last two years to dominate MLB. We can only hope the power systems for his LAZOR hold up for the remainder of his contract extension and that no other teams are able to develop similar LAZORs or force fields which would render his LAZOR useless.

 

 

 

 

 

Recent events have allowed for further development of the Grand Unified Theory on the Rockies cheating.

Since his return from the DL, Tulo is hitting .377 with 17 HRs. For the advanced metric crew, his wOBA is a ridiculous .541 over the past month, as Amoeba was kind enough to post in the comments section of Sunday, September 19ths RockPile.  Additionally, Todd Helton has returned to the level of play we saw last season over the past month since his return from the DL (.404 wOBA), Aaron Cook was vintage after returning from the DL for 2 starts, and Jason Hammel has gone 10-6 and lowered his ERA from 9.16 to 4.45 since he returned from the DL in May. How have these players improved so much after being injured? How has Tulo been able to hit the ball so well after what was believed to be a power-sapping injury? Many fans have already pointed to the obvious answer: steroids.

After an injury, the adrenal gland produces heightened levels of Cortisol, also known as hydrocortisone, a steroid hormone. This means that each of the players listed above had heightened steroid levels in their body at some point since they got injured. This is obviously a subtle way the Rockies have been cheating this year: increase steroid levels in player’s bodies by getting injured. The Rockies have indeed been hit hard by injuries this year and, not surprisingly after seeing this new information, have performed much better since all of their starters returned from the DL. While most Rockies fans certainly do not condone this blatant cheating by their purple-clad heroes, they can be consoled by the fact that cheating like this has been going on for years, unabated! In fact, MLB has been REWARDING and LAUDING players for cheating through injury since 2005 with the Major League Baseball Comeback Player of the Year Award.  The NFL, always the leader in steroid abuse but never in condemnation, has had a Comeback Player of the Year Award winner since 1972 (presented by Pro Football Weekly). When will congress step in and stop this?!

Armed with this new information, it is obvious what teams need to do to take advantage of this to improve team performance: cause injury to their players, especially when performance is worse than expected. The injury caused can be placed on a scale from a small wrap on the wrists with a ruler for an error, to something much more severe, like castration, for playing like Pedro Feliz (-2.4 WAR, 0.8 worse than anyone else). Speaking of Astros, they may consider some form of group punishment,  as they have 3 of the worst 5 players in MLB by WAR this season (Feliz, Carlos Lee at -1.6, and Tommy Manzella at -1.4). Might I suggest hosting a Celine Dion and Cher duet concert with mandatory player attendance?

If MLB, and the other major sports, don’t want to turn into an S&M aficionado’s paradise or make each clubhouse feel like a Turkish prison, they will want to step in and put a stop to this cheating at once.

There have been many attempts of late to explain the Rockies home/road splits. There was an excellent, if not misguided article about Carlos Gonzalez on the Athletics SBN site linked this week, as well as several mass media articles. Several of these articles have pointed out how the ball doesn’t break the same at Coors Field as it does at more altitude-challenged stadiums, while many individuals have claimed the Rockies are obviously cheating, no one has yet come out with the Grand Unified Theory (GUT). This theory will tie together all of the independent theories on the interaction of players and baseballs at altitude due to each of the different types of possible cheating (e.g., dehumidified balls being used late in games because they are harder and more difficult to throw, bullpen mounds having improper slope, runners at second base relaying signs to batters, and praying) into one grand explanation of life at altitude, the Coors universe and everything. The reason this theory has not yet been discovered is there is one missing link that has eluded the scientific community for years; a missing link that has now been discovered!

The Rockies cheating ways is as simple as the color on their uniforms. Purple. There is a simple relationship between the energy and the wavelength of light, as shown in Eqn. 1.

 

E=hc/(λ) (Eqn. 1)

where E is energy, h is Planck’s constant (h = 4.135 x 10^-15 eV-sec), and c is the speed of light (c = 3 x 10^10 cm/second). An inverse relationship is shown between the energy and the wavelength of light. This means that teams with longer wavelengths on their uniforms and therefore, in the stands will have less energy reflected at them. As the only MLB with purple in their jerseys, the Rockies are able to feed off this energy while playing at home, and the sea of purple manages to actually carry the team. In 2010, you can see a very clear linear relationship in Fig. 1 between wins and primary non-black/white team color. Due to the nature of all teams including black and/or white in their uniforms, these colors have been removed from each team’s list of colors for this study to further highlight extent of the treachery occurring in Colorado.

Figure 1. Exhibit A of the sinister nature of the Colorado Rockies.

This trend is not a function of small sample size, as it has been the case since 2007, the year the Diamondbacks foolishly removed the color purple from their wardrobe. For teams with two non-black/white colors, the wavelengths of these colors have been averaged for this portion of the study.

 

 

Figure 2. Exhibit B of the purple conspiracy.

These trends can lead to the conclusion that it is not a coincidence that the Diamondbacks and Rockies have been the two most successful franchises in their first 3-4 years in MLB history, nor that the Diamondbacks have had a lower than average number of wins since they changed their colors. Early in 2007 many fans still wore purple, but as the color has faded from their memories, so have the totals in the wins column.

Finally, the home/road splits of individual players can now be fully explained and a GUT derived, as at Coors Field there is not only thin air, but more purple wearing charlatans than on the road, leading to a much larger amount of energy being reflected back on the field and transferred into the game and ball. Some of this energy has to turn into kinetic energy, causing the balls to fly further and the bats to be swung faster. Bullpen mounds feel different because there is protection from the sea of purple, while it will strike down an unprepared pitcher with the fury of a thousand burning suns when they take the mound in a game. This is the nature of the most heinous of crimes being committed routinely in plain sight for the last 17 years in Denver: beating other teams in a game of baseball.

Welcome to "’Physics’ of Baseball 4: Stealing Directions, Not Signs," another co-authored work by Realmenwearpurple of Purple Row and Keithsmoustache of Amazin’ Ave. In previous installments of this continuing series, we have investigated ways to use the gravitational field of players and fans to a team’s advantage. Gravity and other physics of the ballplayer/Earth system have several other effects upon the game, most notably with the stolen base. Join after the jump to see how stealing can really weigh on a player.

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The art of pitching breaking balls often involves spinning a ball as you throw it such that it moves in a way that it would not without the spin. Knuckleballs, however, do not try to use this rotating force to break, instead depending upon a different mechanism. This weekend, the Rockies will most likely face Charlie Haeger, a knuckleballer. This post is intended to address: 1) Why breaking balls break, providing some explanation for why pitches at Coors, even with THE HUMIDOR, don’t seem to break as much as they do at parks like PetCo, and 2) how the knuckleball works, from an aerodynamics point of view. This first point is probably preaching to the choir, but with any luck it will be informative to someone.

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This is a collaborative effort between Realmenwearpurple from Purple Row and Keithsmoustache from Amazin' Avenue.  the motivation came from a discussion of the gravitational prowess of Prince Fielder on opening day.  It is the second in a (hopefully continuing) series of investigations into "The Physics of Baseball."

 

Baseball is a simple game.  You throw the ball, you hit the ball, and you run as fast as you can in between.  The harder you play, be it with grit, passion, or for the most valuable players, both (grission), the better chance your team has at winning. Or so we thought. Apparently there is a third, and much more appealing characteristic great MLB players can have. Mass. Lots of it. Over time this has proven to be true: Babe Ruth and Tony Gwynn are Hall of Famers.  David Wells threw a perfect game.  CC Sabathia is currently the highest paid pitcher in baseball.  The list goes on and on.  The ball seems to gravitate towards the great players.  Now we can prove that it indeed does!

What is gravity? It is one of the four natural forces of nature.  All objects with mass attract one another. Gravity can be described as:

where F is the gravitational force on an object, G is the gravitational constant, m1 and m2 are the masses of the two bodies, and r is the distance between these bodies.

 

This force will increase as the distance between the objects is decreased or the mass of either of the objects is increased. This leads to the conclusion that heavier players have a natural gravitational force on any and all objects that is greater than smaller players.  This includes the baseball! Since baseball is a game of inches, each bit of force a team can muster to keep a ball from going over the wall could prove to be the difference between a HR or a long flyout.  In order to prove this, an investigation was performed into the weight of the starting infields and the HR/FB rates of NL teams. Why just infielders? Because outfielders start the play so far away from the ball that by the time they are close enough for their gravitational force to be larger than that of the infielders, the outcome of the play has been decided.

 

Figure 1. Gravitational Efficiency of the NL

Judging from this data, it indicates that there is a negative trend, however we see several cities which may be interfering with our data.  Several teams should be ignored. Also, there are too many data points which will just clutter any analysis.  So to simplify this study we will remove the following teams and provide sound scientific reasoning behind each decision:

1.  Philadelphia.  They booed Santa. They throw batteries in snowballs, Shane Victorino exists.  Karma is just waiting to mess with them, so we never know when the data may become skewed. Finally, anything associated with John Kruk must be ignored as non-sensical dribble.

 
Figure 2. John Kruk. Gravitational marauder. Talking head.

2.  Atlanta. Between being a top 20 fattest city in the country and being a Delta hub with planes flying overhead constantly, creating downdrafts that will mess with ball trajectories, there are too many factors that will affect the ball.  The impact of these factors is clearly illustrated by the wild fluctuation of stats for "The Natural" Jeff Francoeur while in Atlanta, who would have been a perennial All-Star in a more stable gravitational environment.

3.  San Francisco.  With both Pablo Sandoval and Bengie Molina on one team, this one should have helped prove our point.  However, Barry Bonds’ head and ego are so large they cancel out any other local gravitational fields for miles.

4.  Florida.  If no one sees a ball game, did it really happen?  There are elementary school plays with more people in attendance than Marlins games. And those that do go at least have a chance to see some talent. To avoid having to deal with these variables, Florida has been removed.

Figure 3:  Schröedingers Stadium

5.  Milwaukee.  With all the beer and brats, the gravitational forces are not nearly as strong from the players as the fans themselves, completely negating any chance of obtaining reliable data from this club.

6.  Cincinnati.  Along with Milwaukee and Atlanta, this is one of the top 20 fattest cities in the country.  The fans’ mass will completely overwhelm the gravitational effect of the infielders.

7.  Houston. We have a problem. Everyone knows that NASA solved gravity years ago, and since they have strong roots in Houston, one can’t help but suspect that the secret may have been leaked to the Astros. Also, everything is bigger in Texas, messing with gravity further.  Their data can’t be believed.

 

Figure 4. Gravitational efficiency for a selection of NL ballclubs.

Figure 4 proves the hypothesis correct! The data indicates an amazing correlation between gravitational impulse and park adjusted HR/FB%.  Interestingly enough, two of the most successful teams in the NL are on the upper left hand side of this curve, in Los Angles and St Louis, proving that the extra mass from Manny (a combination of his head, hair, and unborn baby) and Fat Albert, respectively, did help them win! 

From this data we can conclude that in order to minimize the home runs allowed to opponents, players need to maximize their waist size. Next week, we will investigate the effect of having a heavier player on spray charts.

 

Last year there were a lot of self-proclaimed nerds and geeks in the game threads and discussions often went off-topic.  Once a discussion I was part of even went to helping a younger Rowbot with his/her physics homework!  Well, this post may only interest the geekiest of the bunch, but during one game last year I promised to check into the effect of a phenomenon called the "drag crisis" or "drag bucket"on balls hit at Coors field, and how it affects the trajectory of a fly ball.  The original hypothesis was that this drag crisis or bucket would decrease the Reynolds number of the flow such that drag COEFFICIENT would actually be higher on the ball at Coors than at ballparks at "normal" (closer to sea-level) altitudes, canceling the change in air density on drag. I remembered this recently while reading about baseball aerodynamics for a class I am taking.  I had to do a project on flow stability and since my research deals with spinning bodies I decided to discuss stability of flow over spinning cones, football-shapes, cylinders, and spheres.  Most of this reading and work I did with baseball aerodynamics had to do with the instability of flow over knuckleballs.  If I get enough interest shown in the comments section, I will make a post later in spring training discussing these instabilities, but if you want to know more about it you can always read references [1-3].

If I haven't scared you away yet, join after the jump to really get your nerd on.

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