This Is Not News

Read this story by Jayson Stark about how detailed scouting information on hitters in baseball is stored, analyzed, and disseminated. It’s a great piece of writing that dives into one of the big reasons that scoring in baseball is down. Teams now know so much about individual hitters’ tendencies that they can craft a specific game plan geared to exploiting each player’s weaknesses and getting them out.

Stark is a longtime Philadelphia resident, so it’s not surprising that he uses an example that’s familiar to most Phillies fans. Ryan Howard had a couple of gigantic offensive years when he first became a regular. But as teams gathered more data on him, they realized what a phenomenally bad idea it was to throw him a fastball, so they’ve done it less and less often. They also move their fielders from where they traditionally would position themselves to the spots where Howard usually hits the ball. The result is that while Howard has had good numbers since his early years, they haven’t been as good.

As Stark says, more and more teams are using “unconventional” defense on more and more hitters. Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon sits down with an iPad each morning and combs through the statistics his organization has compiled in order to devise defensive positioning and pitching approaches for that night’s game.

There are a couple of things that fascinate me about this story. One is that I like the example of a way that technology has made specific information available and accessible. We hear a lot about how the Web and Google put a lot of general information at everyone’s fingertips, but this is much more detailed information than you find on Wikipedia or Retrosheet, and it’s easier for people to process because it can be presented using the iPad.

The other is that Stark suggests that even as Maddon’s Rays have shown a lot of success with their defensive shifts, many teams don’t replicate his aggressiveness because they’re too comfortable with traditional approaches. It’s an interesting example of how information can help you – if you’re willing to use it. That lesson applies to a lot more than just baseball.

I have spent the last several months tracking websites and doing research in order to buy a new computer this holiday season. I’m thinking that instead of ordering from a place like Dell, I’ll go with one of the smaller operations that lets you pick exactly what pieces of hardware you want. So I know a lot more about cases and power supplies than I did when the summer started.

As much fun as I’m having, though, part of me wonders if I need a computer the way I used to. I bought my current desktop in 2006 when I was finishing my dissertation and needed to use a desktop publishing program to lay out the whole thing. Since then, I haven’t really been doing the graphic design or image editing that would require a really powerful machine.

I still do a decent amount of writing and reading on the Web, but I am very fortunate to have a school-issued laptop for that. I also use it to do my grading using a program provided by the school – although that’s changing to a web-based app, so by next year I may only need a tablet with Internet access to do my grades. The major drawback with the laptop is that I don’t love the laptop keyboard. It reminds me too much of the keyboards I used in college, when I wound up with a very sore left wrist. I have an ergonomic keyboard on my desktop. Thing is, the desktop is downstairs. The laptop lets me hang out in the living room or the dining room and not feel like I’m ignoring my family. I’ve started using Google Docs to do some of my writing and record-keeping, so I may not even need to buy a copy of Microsoft Office anymore.

If push came to shove I could probably do a lot of the reading and writing with a tablet, but as much fun as the iPad appears to be, I haven’t found the killer app that’s the reason to pick one up.

If I’m honest with myself, there is really only one reason why I am even thinking about buying a new computer, and that’s computer games. I would need to do some major upgrading to my current machine to be able to play Mass Effect 3 when it comes out, so it makes more sense to buy a new one. I’m hoping that if I do get an upgraded desktop, I’ll try to do some video editing or other projects for school that will leverage all that power. I’ll probably pick up a Blu-Ray drive to see if that’s worthwhile. But right now, I don’t know if there are that many tasks on my To Do list that require all the computing power that Intel and company are making available.

Still, in the end, I guess I’ll think of something.

Started a new school year today, although the students aren’t back yet. That’ll happen over the next couple of days. But the start of the year has me thinking back. 15 years ago I started my senior ear of college at Fordham University. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because I absolutely would not trade my college experience for just about anything. And since now it’s my job to help high school students prepare to have similarly rewarding experiences, I have to think about why it was so valuable to me.

Certainly there was an academic component. I built a strong foundation in my coursework that helped me get into grad school. I barely had any adjuncts or TAs in four years of classes. Heck, my roommate from junior year is a veterinarian, my roommate from senior year is a medical doctor, and two of my editors-in-chief from the newspaper went on to get doctoral degrees. Lots of my friends were no less brilliant for not getting time-consuming and expensive terminal degrees. (Some folks might say that makes them even more brilliant, but that’s just my student loan debt talking.) Rubbing against all that brain power in classrooms and in late-night conversations was a great experience that sped up my thinking and development on a lot of topics.

But the truth is, I was a humanities major. I could get Plato’s Republic out of the library a lot cheaper than I got it from the campus bookstore, let alone the tuition. With the Internet today making more video lectures and discussion for a possible, the truth is that someone who is truly interested in learning the material for the sake of learning the material, rather than getting a credential to tick off a box on a job application, can do so without the actual college experience.

I still feel like I got a lot of value from college. There is a social element, of course. I met many of my best friends at Fordham, and 15 years ago I started dating Pattie. 12 years of marriage and one wonderful daughter later, that seems to be working out. College can’t help but introduce you to a bunch of people, and if you play your cards right you’ll find people you can connect with. There are lots of people in the world, though, so if you keep your eyes open you could probably make friends without college, too.

The thing is, it was easier for me to learn that material and easier for me to make those friends because the traditional college experience was, for me, its own little isolated world, a microcosm that brought a lot of people into a relatively confined environment and forced them to bounce off of one another. It accelerated the processes. And because it was a small world, I could explore many different sides of it. In college, I was an academic. I was a journalist and writer. I was a program planner. I wrote a screenplay; I co-wrote a play and got to have it staged. I lived on my own for the first time without having to worry about every single detail that being independent requires. I got to grow up, figure out who I wanted to be and build up some resources to help me become that person. For me, it worked, and that’s why I will forever be grateful to Fordham.