No Blue Electrons have come your way for a few days, because I have had the fortune to attend two major league baseball games in two days (at the same place), a concentration of big league action that I might never experience again. My first night was sponsored by Trader Joe's, as an outing for "crew" members, and I attended along with eleven other co-workers. The second night I took the place of a spouse who could not attend; since the couple had a pre-paid game plan, I was invited to come along instead.

Since these games were National League, I approached them with indifference. As an American League fan I had little knowledge or interest in what sports journalists call "the senior circuit." But I was moved to root root root for the home team, and in my non-Fenway baseball attendance, so far I am one and one. The first night, the home team lost in a draggy game, but the second night, the home team came from behind to win a thrilling contest. I was delighted, and overfed with popcorn. It wasn't Fenway, with the city lights, the Wall, and the immortal Citgo neon triangle, but it was baseball, and that's what counts.

My friend on the second night is an anthropologist, professor at a local college. Every year, she invites me to speak to her introductory anthropology class on comparative religion. It was fun to sit at a baseball game with an anthropologist as she explained why various players do a series of rituals before they come up to bat, or pitch, or even take their position in the field. According to her, the amount of ritualizing is proportional to the lack of control a player (or anyone) has over his/her environment and fortunes. In this view, then, an outfielder, who seems to have less stress in his fielding and more time to find the ball (unless he's Manny Ramirez), would do a minimum of ritual. But a batter who was facing fastballs at over 95 miles an hour would do much more. An example of this would be ex-Red Sox Nomar Garciaparra's obsessive glove-twitching before he steps up to the plate. The most ritualizing, then, is done by the fans, who have no control whatsoever over what happens down on the field. A stadium full of ritually garbed fans, chanting and waving, is an anthropologist's delight.

And of course baseball is also a joy for the would-be physicist and mathematician. The trajectory of the ball, especially on a night without much wind, is clearly parabolic, though I had no way of knowing how fast it was going as it left the bat. (R.K. Adair, in THE PHYSICS OF BASEBALL, gives a sample velocity of 110 mph at a 35 degree angle, for a home-run-length hit.) Adair stresses that air resistance must be factored into every hit, no matter whether there is wind. Many years ago, I drew cartoons of space-suited astronauts playing baseball on the moon, and I'm sorry that they never got to do it to see how far a ball would go in a vacuum with one-sixth Earth gravity.

Baseball is a treasure of mathematical symbolism. Just the squareness of the field is enough to lead into Pythagorean speculation. The four-ness of the bases is set off by the perfect square of the nine players and the nine innings. The National League is here mathematically superior to the American League which has adulterated the perfect square with the tenth man, the "designated hitter." The four-ness of balls for a walk is played against the three-ness of strikes for a strikeout. These numbers are only the simplest, most obvious elements of a game filled with sacred numerology.

As the paint dries on my current project, I continue to clank along on those physics problems about ropes and blocks and inclined planes and cranking pulleys. The graphs that try to illustrate the vertical and horizontal components of motion up or down an inclined plane do nothing for me. I have never seen one that made sense to me. So, rather unscientifically, I must take it on faith that one direction comes from the cosine of the incline's angle and the other from the sine. In these problems, my artistic intuition does not serve me at all, but misleads me. If I were in a class having to do these problems, I would already be helplessly behind the group, having been lost somewhere down at the bottom of the incline with a very high coefficient of friction.

Posted at 3:33 am | link