Juiced Baseballs

538 you say??  Aren't they the ones that said Hillary had a 98% chance over Trump?

I can't believe they're still in business.  Actually, I think they are being shopped around.

The highest 538 had Clinton was about 89% (twice), one of those being after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced. To connect it to baseball, their final report said Trump had a 28.6% chance of winning. Would you say that a .286 hitter has no shot of getting a hit? No question they got it wrong, but so did every other "traditional" polling firm. We should find out if they learned anything from the experience in November.

How did 538 get it wrong? Looks like they were fine. The batting average analogy is a good one: if the election were held 100 times, Trump would win 29 of them. And that's what we ended up with.. Wrong would be to say Trump had no chance. Even the NY Times (super left wing?) said Trump could win.   https://www.nytimes.com/intera...-polls-forecast.html

As for juiced baseballs, 538 presents some decent evidence - I was especially surprised that a small increase in distance (9ft) results in a 25% increase in HRs. I'm wondering if I can work this article into next week's physics lessons on collisions. 

Fan2024 posted:

How did 538 get it wrong? Looks like they were fine. The batting average analogy is a good one: if the election were held 100 times, Trump would win 29 of them. And that's what we ended up with.. Wrong would be to say Trump had no chance. Even the NY Times (super left wing?) said Trump could win.   https://www.nytimes.com/intera...-polls-forecast.html

 

As for juiced baseballs, 538 presents some decent evidence - I was especially surprised that a small increase in distance (9ft) results in a 25% increase in HRs. I'm wondering if I can work this article into next week's physics lessons on collisions. 

Sorry to say, but if you can't work this into next week's physics lessons, than you are either studying something something very specific or you are simply not a good teacher (the last part was just necessary to finish out my thought - no offense intended).  All sorts of physics problems here.  I think the air resistance is a nice one.  If you are teaching advanced physics, then maybe some work on moving weight outwards, in relative terms, from the core to the winding/cover and the effect on spin.  Then how spin translates into distance.  I really have no idea what I am talking about here, but did take physics in high school.

Everyone who hasn't already done so needs to go to Nathan's website and see just how much a baseball deforms on impacts.  It is really surprising it holds its shape as well as it does.