Nerd!!!!!

(ahem, where do I sign up for the class?)

Apparently now that Roy Halladay is in the NL, he’s going to post a -2.00 ERA. Just as Johan Santana has done.

pitching theories of Mike Marshall. Maybe delve into the Bob Feller and Nolan Ryan issues with pitchers throwing every day and the like.

My suggestion is less scientific than most of what you already had, but since you raised the idea of myth, legend, and tradition in your course description, I would find it interesting to track the development of baseball writing in contributing to said myth, legend, tradition. That is, how has the long history of baseball writing, especially prior to television, contributed to the development of current standard practices or entrenched ideas in baseball?

Bat vibration modeling
The effect of emerald ash borer (an asian beetle species brought over accidentally) on bat manufacturing
Turfgrass management issues for athletic fields

I would also like to sign up for this class.

you sir, are living the dream. if you need a TA or something to help grade papers you have my email.

can you tell im only half-joking?

This one discusses bats.

Beyond that, I suggest as many guest speakers as you can schedule. Big time baseball nerds will go out of their way to help you, even driving in from a nearby university. Guest speakers break things up in interesting, credible, memorable ways, for my money.

I haven’t read it, but Will Carroll’s The Juice: The Real Story of Baseball’s Drug Problems might be good reading material to answer the “how effective are steroids” question.

They have tons of youtube videos online. (what’s it called again? they always advertise it on reds games.)

You might do something on at least the story of Voros McCracken. Proud to say that I read Neyer’s article the day it came out.

Aside from the impact on DiPS, FIP, and BABIP, it’s an interesting story, right? The quintessential guy in his mom’s basement dorking around on a computer posts something. It gets picked up by ESPN (granted, Neyer was out there for ESPN at the time), and in a few years this guy is working for a Major League team. To me, that’s an important part of the social story of sabermetrics.

It was this idea — that a nobody could suddenly rise to the top — that engendered, IMHO, a lot of the sabermetric antipathy among “baseball men.” It wasn’t that they had anything against numbers per se. It was that someone could come out of the blue and take away their job.

there was a fair amount of material about how the ball is made to curve and drop etc..technical stuff about gravity and ari pressure etc. Also a good amount of material on the physics of hitting – what happens to the baseball when its hit and where on the bat etc.

I am scientifically challenged so I don’t know the specifics..but there is a lot of information available about baseball and physics.