Sunday Science Day

By Jon Weisman

Hope you’re having a nice, lazy Sunday morning. Here are a few stories you can settle into, from baseball’s metaphorical laboratory …

• Something striking from this Matthew Leach article at MLB.com (via MLB Trade Rumors) about research into reducing Tommy John operations: “Youth pitchers who said that they had ‘often pitched’ when fatigued were a staggering 36 times more likely to have needed surgery.”
• This paper by Joe Rosales and Scott Spratt of Baseball Info Solutions takes pitch-framing analysis a step farther by attempting to break down the influence of not only the catcher, but also the pitcher, batter and umpire (via Baseball Think Factory).
• “No one would have predicted he would find himself blindfolded and bouncing on a trampoline in a doctor’s office in Las Vegas.” How’s that for an intriguing setup for Chelsea Janes’ story in the Washington Post about the effect of inner-ear dysfunction, using Nationals second baseman Dan Uggla as a focal point (also via BTF).
• This might not seem like science per se, unless you allow for the science of human behavior. Brandon McCarthy is among those quoted in this Anthony Castrovince story at Sports on Earth about potential changes to the strike zone, particularly with regard to the low strike.
  

  “We’re all just an ant colony,” McCarthy said. “You put something in front of us, we’ll all just figure out a way to go around it and something else will emerge in its place. But it would be interesting to see how long that adjustment would take.”