Baseball is a natural context in which to learn about statistics. Our national pastime is replete with averages and percentages, counts and amounts, and totals of all kind. To the fan, these are not mere numbers, but condensed stories, instantly intelligible as the true literature of the game. Compared to more fluid sports such as football, basketball, hockey, and soccer, baseball especially le...

CONTEXT Stretching prior to activity or as a rehabilitative intervention may promote increased throwing shoulder range of motion (ROM) in baseball pitchers. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the acute effects of Fauls modified passive stretching routine on throwing shoulder mobility in collegiate baseball players. DESIGN Repeated measures. SETTING Laboratory. PARTICIPANTS Thirty collegiate baseball...

When watching a baseball player hit, it is clear that vision is a dominant sensory system. The visual skills of a baseball player go beyond static visual acuity (ability to see clearly in a non-moving position while looking at a nonmoving object); hitters must use their vision dynamically. These dynamic visual skills include stereo acuity (depth perception), visual attention, eye movements, dyn...

Hollow nonwood baseball bats have performance advantages over wooden bats. The hollow barrel bats act as a spring or trampoline during the bat-ball collision. The trampoline effect can occur at different natural frequencies known as hoop modes. To examine the effect of the hoop mode on the bat-ball collision, modal analysis and performance measurements were performed on a sample of hollow nonwo...

Introduction Appropriate stature and adequate somatotype are not the only attributes determining athletic performance, but they are important prerequisites for sports participation and success. However, there is scant literature on baseball players' kinanthropometric profiles and their association with performance. Given that Cuban baseball players have been among the world's top performers in ...

OBJECTIVE To describe the prevalence, patterns, and correlates of spit (smokeless) tobacco (ST) use in a sample of high school baseball athletes in California. DESIGN This cross sectional study was a survey of 1226 baseball athletes attending 39 California high schools that were randomly selected from a list of all publicly supported high schools with baseball teams. At a baseball team meetin...

BACKGROUND Because of the problem of elbow and shoulder injuries in baseball pitchers between 9 and 14 years of age, the USA Baseball Medical & Safety Advisory Committee and the Department of Recreation and Sports in Puerto Rico developed injury prevention guidelines for pitchers. The purpose of this study was to determine the compliance of pitching coaches of 9- to 14-year-old Little League te...

When we use mathematical tools, such as differential equations, probability, or systems of linear equations, to describe a real-world situation, we say that we are employing a mathematical model. Such models must be sufficiently sophisticated to capture the essential features of the situation, while remaining computationally manageable. In this chapter we are interested in one particular type o...