Hot from the news wires: Tonight, Albert Pujols became the fastest player in major league history to reach 19 home runs during the start of the season. He has 19 home runs in 37 games, breaking the record set by Mickey Mantle in 1956 by 3 games. Can’t wait to see the rest of his season! Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, eat your heart out – records are made to be broken. (BTW: for the uninitiated, this is serious baseball.)
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
Site Meter
May 14th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
I’m confused. Why is 19 significant? Why not 20 in more games, or 18 in fewer?
I’m probably being silly here. Presumably the ratio homerun/games is to be maximized, and somebody decided that it should be measured after some minimum number of games? Or that we fix the number 19 and see how many games it takes to reach 19? but why was 19 chosen and not some other number?
Ok..I’ll shut up now. I don’t really understand Sports much.
-cvj
May 14th, 2006 at 11:47 pm
19 is only significant in that he is the quickest to reach it.
There is a similar record for every number, many of which he is on pace to break…these aren’t hallowed records by any means, but baseball is such a number-worshipping game that this stuff is always kept track of.
I’m not being critical, here…I’d love to see the table of dudes-quickest-to-N homeruns records…
May 15th, 2006 at 12:02 am
Us Astros fans know that Pujols is the man. Who can forget him crushing a hanging Brad Lidge slider last year in Game 6 of the NLCS. Think about this–Pujols doesn’t have any major controversies surrounding him…no steroids like Bonds of McGuire. And he is an excellent defensive first baseman.
May 15th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Is that the same Clifford Johnson who wrote the textbook D-Branes?
May 15th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Even more exciting than the run at the home run record, he’s on pace to break Hack Wilson’s 76-year old single season RBI record. In any sport, it’s always spectacular to watch a previously great, MVP-caliber player then dial it up, and have an absolutely superlative season. And even better to see that guy play for your favorite team. And he raises and donates scads of money to muscular dystrophy.
May 15th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
vince: Er…maybe. Who wants to know?
-cvj
May 15th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
I do. Don’t worry, I’m just curious. Jacques Distler recommended it at the start of his string theory class last fall. Although I didn’t really study from it, from the little I’ve read, I think it looks like a good book.
May 15th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
baseball is indeed the game of stats, endless recording of pitch by every single pitch for more than 100 years has enabled this one sport (with cricket as a possible second) to be open to statistical analyses beyond the point of reason or purpose. I suppose some, with specific axes to grind sharply to cut down opposing fan reasoning, may find that by delving into this arcana they can stand mightily on the statistical pedestal. It is what isn’t in the stats that are just as important. Why is there no discussion of the relavance of a “juicier” baseball, ordered up in this post-obvious steroid era, in pumping up new sets of stats to “prove” that players, who are undoubtedly vastly superior in terms of masking the intricasies of therapies to maintain and improve performance, can still break records? There has been no discussion of pitchers over the last two decades and the incredible advancements in treatment regimens, prescibed rehabilitation programs that have included steroids, and other training improvements–all of which drove along with the hitters gaining strength however they chose. To condemn Bonds and McGwire without discussing the pitchers perverts the sport as a whole. There are two kids on the Agoura High School number one ranked team in the nation, who are pitching in the mid-90’s. That wasn’t the case fifteen or twenty years ago, but you find it all over the country now.
May 15th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
Spyder–
Didn’t Dwight Gooden throw like 95 mph in high school (~20 years ago)?
May 15th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
how long before steinbrenner takes an interest do you guys think?
May 15th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
Spyder – I know of several guys who threw in the 90’s in the 1970’s (radar guns were new!) who were in High schools around southeast Wisconsin. Speed has always been around. Curveballs though…
May 15th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
While there is no doubt that Pujols is the best hitter in baseball right now, records like “fastest player to N homeruns” or “most consecutive wins to start a season” come and go like 2.5 sigma signals for SUSY. That is to say, they are fluctuations, and while I hope Pujols has a monster season just like I hope Run II actually finds *real* evidence for SUSY, I’m not going to hold my breath. But maybe theorists are naturally more hopeful. If so I would expect more to be Cubs fans…
May 15th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Clifford: You are correct that there is nothing inherently significant about either “19 HRs” or “37 games.” Each number is, however, “big enough” to imply meaning: 19 is a whole lot of HRs for mid-May, and 37 games is enough to suggest that his feats are not just flukes or coincidences of timing. Pujols is performing at an exceptionally high level, not just compared to his colleagues this season but compared to the iconic figures in baseball history. It is, so far, an astonishing, world-class athletic performance, worth noting for that reason alone even if you neither understand nor care about baseball.
May 16th, 2006 at 12:15 am
I think steinbrener can’t touch pujols–that’s my suspision. The Cards are looking to build their team around him in the future (hes like 25 I think), and he is signed for quite a long time. Look at his career stats–in five years he already has 200+ home runs, 1000+ hits, and a .330 batting average (ration of hits to at bats). Make no mistake–without Pujols won’t make the playoffs. Plus, Steinbrener doesn’t have the farm system to trade for Pujols either.
May 17th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Okay, I was a big Pittsburgh Pirates fan when I was in college (undergrad) they won the World Series in ‘79..way back in mid to late 70’s..the same generation of Joanne, Melissa Franklin, Lisa Randall (we’re 40′ish now). Aka, “The Lumber Company”: Willie Stargell, Dave Parker, Manny Sanguillen, Richie Hebner, et al. Being from central Illinois, I was in Cardinal & Cub country (Joanne is Iowa). A good friend of mine was a bigtime Cards fan, his family would take him to St Louis for playoff games (”playing hookey”).
Mike Shannon (Card player for World Series team, then announcer) would always harp on the Buco’s (sland for Buccaneer, i.e. Pirates):
“Man, those Pirates are FREE SWINGERS..they’ll swing at ANYTHING”
“SOMEONE’S gonna pay!!..when the Bucs come out of their hitting slump!”
“nothing beats a frosty cold Busch (beer)”
Bob Costas (well known NBC sports announcer these days), was wallowing as a radio DJ doing baseball. I would listen to him. I got to know the Cards, Cubs, Reds announcers, in order to listen to Pirate games.
The only thing I remember about the Cards, was Ted Simmons (he was the All Star rep for the Cards)..There was this right fielder George xxx (ex San Diego Padre, black player) who absolutely SHUNNED the media. Just like Steve Carlton (aka “Lefty”) for the Phillies.
Huh, who woulda thought? Physicsts who are baseball fans.
BTW, that famous opera-singer (forgot her name) was a childhood Yankees fan who was a groupie at Yankee stadium. Face it, Baseball is the national sport..it’s a part of American culture.
I want to hear Mark (UK native) start a thread on the World Cup soccer tournament. I saw a BBC preview on the plane trip back from Frankfurt/Egypt on Lufthansa..good stuff.
May 17th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Gbob, some of these records are indeed statistical fluctuations. If you imagine that the “largest number of home runs in first 37 games” is a random Gaussian variable, how often do you expect a record to be set? Certainly the first year; the you have to wait on average about 7 years for the next record, and another 20 for the next, and about 40 for the next. It slows down. After 100 years of baseball, you’d expect such any given record to be broken only once or twice in your lifetime. So they’re worth celebrating, I think. (Physics geekery: I just worked that out with a quick Monte Carlo in ROOT 5. Thanks, Rene Brun!)
Of course, a) there are lots of minor records to watch, so you expect a few to fall every year. That’s good; it’d be boring if there were nothing to do but wait for the next .406 hitter. b) The various records are correlated, and they’re not Gaussian random variables at all—you can see the stats shift and change over time as the game changes, as new muscle-building drugs are invented and banned, etc..
In some sense, you really want to cheer for some sort of “fundamental” measure of baseball skill, not for an imperfect statistical estimator of that skill. Given the statistics (19 HR in 130 at-bats), we can’t tell if Pujols’ “underlying” HR rate is really 14.6/130 (0.11) or 23.3/130 (0.18), so the specific number 19 represents a combination of skill (a home run probability with (at 68% confidence) a lower bound of 0.11 per at-bat) and luck (the statistical fluctuation up to 0.14). But the records don’t represent a bunch of lackluster coin flips, or something, for which we all sit around and cheer when it comes up “heads” 19 times. Every one of those home runs is an noteworthy feat of eyesight and coordination, and he’s done it one out of seven at-bats. Wow.