Why Understanding Particle Physics is Vital to Understanding Baseball Pitching
Baseball coaches and gurus are constantly trying to simplify the baseball pitching motion to sell services and products. To me, this is intellectually dishonest and does a very large disservice to the chaotic nature of kinesiology and biomechanics. The best way I can explain this is by letting Richard Feynman do it. Since I can't figure out how to embed a YouTube video at a certain time, click here for the explanation in the latest Symphony of Science video.
The transcript of his short speech is:
"It's very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like. 'Electrons act like waves,' no they don't exactly. 'They act like particles,' no they don't exactly."
People get frustrated when statements like this are made! Feynman's rebuttal was to say that if he simplified the argument for you any further, he'd be lying to you about how it works. The same holds true in baseball pitching and kinesiology in general.
First of all, most baseball coaches are very ignorant when it comes to the actual, very real classical mechanics of throwing a baseball. Example statements by these coaches that are said when trying to fix someone's "mechanics" are:
- Bend your back when you release the ball
- Stride farther to increase fastball velocity
- Grab some dirt on the way down
But even "enlightened" coaches will say psuedo-scientific things like:
- Scapular loading stretches out the muscles in the shoulder and increases the stretch-shortening cycle
- The faster the hips and shoulders turn, the more velocity can be imparted to the baseball
- Your muscles are like a rubber band - stretch them out before contracting them to throw harder
The body is more than a series of levers, pulleys, and rope tied together, just like our universe is more than the simple answer of 12 particles of matter and 4 forces of nature. It's about the interaction between these items that we seek to understand - something we're very far away from in both disciplines, I might add. The famous double-slit experiment demonstrates the duality of waves and particles. Feynman famously said that the entire mystery of quantum mechanics could be understood through the double-slit experiment, and there are multiple interpretations of understanding this experiment. Peter Shor put it very well when he said:
Interpretations of quantum mechanics, unlike Gods, are not jealous, and thus it is safe to believe in more than one at the same time. So if the many-worlds interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in April, and the Copenhagen interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in June, the Copenhagen interpretation is not going to smite you for praying to the many-worlds interpretation. At least I hope it won’t, because otherwise I’m in big trouble.
The same is true about the understanding of kinesiological phenomenon like the Stretch-Shortening Cycle. We think we understand how this works as exercise scientists, but the mechanism of action remains unknown. This is much simpler to understand than the double-slit experiment, of course, but the problem plagues this phenomenon as it does with many indescribable things that seem to be true.
Research exists that show that the forces on the elbow present when a pitcher is throwing 90+ MPH is enough force to rupture the ulnar collateral ligament, yet a pitcher can throw for years without severe damage to this ligament. We think we know how the muscles in the forearm help to protect the elbow depending on the angular velocities of the arm, but we do not know. The truth, simply put, is that the forces required to throw this hard are enough to rupture the UCL, period. So why doesn't the UCL rupture in all athletes? And why do some UCLs rupture at speeds much lower than 90 MPH? Does it have to do with the positioning of the forearm at release, or how the inertial mass of the baseball is achieved? All good questions, all without real, true answers - and it's exceedingly likely that there will never be concrete answers to these questions in my lifetime.
Others have said the job of coaching (and teaching) is to simplify a subject matter so that people can understand it. "The duality of waves and particles is too confusing, can't you simplify it," someone might ask? The ultimate answer, of course, is:
I'm not going to lie to you so you can feel good about understanding something that no one understands. If you want that, there are plenty of coaches who have never picked up a textbook on kinesiology or physics who will tell you things that will satisfy you.
The Pleasure IS Hard Work, Not the Outcome
I had two conversations that inspired me to make this blog post. Last night I had a lengthy conversation about some career opportunities that I may or may not have down the line in addition to various topics that always creep into our late-night conversations, and today I had a short talk with another close friend of mine that I don't see all that often. What came up in both conversations is the fact that I like to work hard on difficult to solve problems, mostly related to baseball. The first person shares this love for hard work with me, though in a different realm - so we commiserate easily about that. The second person does not, however - he's incredibly frustrated at his job where he busts his ass and has little energy afterwards to pursue opportunities that he likes to do.
My second friend told me today that he's very proud of me. Knowing that he probably wasn't referring to my newborn son, I asked him: "Proud of what?" He said: "You pursue your dreams, and this opportunity that you're involved with now seems like a dream opportunity finally come to life due to all your hard work!"
I reflected for a bit, and it made sense why he was burnt out from hard work at his day job and frustrated with some aspects of his life. (He is generally a very positive and happy person, lest I make it sound like he's always negative.) I told him: "Achieving the goals and ends I have for myself are the least important part of my life. I take great pleasure in the hard work I do to pursue these goals that I have - I do not expect to be content when I reach these mid-term goals that I have for myself." He responded that he wished he had energy to pursue some of the goals he had but that his day job sucked much of the life out of him, and I told him: "Your day job is what it is. Leave it there. My day job often frustrates me due to its complexity, but at the end of the day, we are both employed, earning a pretty good salary, and if this is what we fall back on, then that's pretty good. Cherish the fact that you will have the opportunity to work hard on projects you love. Whether or not they bear fruit is meaningless."
I give my Introduction to Political Science professor (in junior college) a lot of credit for enlightening me to process-oriented concepts; a life philosophy that was ironed out by studying sabermetrics and the Moneyball revolution.
My first friend put it very succinctly: "The opportunity to put in hours and hours of hard work on something that has meaning to you is a very rare opportunity in the world."
When I summed all this up for my second friend, he seemed to understand. I hope he is able to find peace and the time to find the same opportunity that I've been given, for it is the greatest gift that I have in my life.
A Brief Rant on Neo-Sabermetrics
(taken from a message board post where I was discussing PITCHf/x uncertainty)
Discussion of these correction algorithms and uncertainty around something that is precisely measured brings up a tangential point: Physicists are rather famous for saying "Any measurement that you make without knowledge of its uncertainty is completely meaningless." (Walter Lewin, actually)
And so this is a good thing that we talk about it for PITCHf/x, because uncertainty is good. However, the move in sabermetrics to blindly accept observed data is very... bad. I'll stand behind OBP and SLG all day, since these have no uncertainties around them. Same with linear weights (for what they area). But... UZR/DRS/TZ.... no. These are based off of observed measurements from BIS/GIS stringers that have a serious uncertainty around them. Additionally, the data has been shown to have serious park biases - especially in Chavez Ravine.
This is the old PECOTA/BPro issue all over again - when you keep data proprietary and sell it piecemeal, you suffer from publisher's bias and all sorts of conflict of interest. And then this data is fitted to an equation that has some regression involved in it, further compounding the error (and worse: drawing conclusions from facts not found in evidence).
UZR and other similar concepts should have an uncertainty listed. Saying someone's UZR is +15.5 is ridiculous; the same is true for saying someone's fastball has a linear weight of +1.2 runs. The former is stupid because stringers have serious uncertainty around them (which goes unreported and unquantified) and the latter is dumb because we do not know for sure that someone's fastball is indeed a fastball (not all pitch types are characterized correctly).
And so the derivation of stuff like linear weights and objective data needs to be separated from the.... well... psuedoscience (psuedoanalysis?) that is often done with UZR/DRS and other measurements like it. Just because analysts qualify that the data is indeed "fuzzy" does not make it okay. You need to publish uncertainty measurements or error bars, otherwise the data (and especially its conclusions) are worthless.
Why Do You Care?
"I can't imagine not caring."
My friend and colleague Zac told me of this exchange that came from one of his short stories. Zac and I were discussing our busy schedules over beers at the local karaoke dive bar. For comparison's sake, Zac is a full-time game designer and could also be described by all of the following titles: Professional book editor, short story writer, screenplay writer, social networking site designer, published poet, political scientist, and literary critic. I'm sure I've left some titles out, but I think you get the point.
We have almost no directly overlapping interests - I'm a full-time programmer/developer and also could be described as an amateur biomechanics analyst and researcher, baseball coach, exercise scientist, game theorist, kinesiologist, physics student, pharmacology researcher, and economist. Worth noting, of course, is that I have very little formal education in most of those fields, and that I don't describe myself as a professional in any of them.
Yet we share the most important thing that makes us such great friends - the passion for knowledge and deep research. We both intensely study fields that nearly everyone thinks are esoteric at best and a waste of time at worst. For Zac, this might be poetry, and for me, this is applied biomechanics as it relates to throwing a baseball (and nothing else). We both spend our "down time" watching world-class lectures on various subjects at Academic Earth (I'm currently watching Walter Lewin's Physics I: Classical Mechanics series to better understand 3-D Kinematics and Vector decomposition; these are key factors when using Direct Linear Translation in biomechanical analysis) or idly thinking about new entrepreneurial ideas.
Example: I just spent my lunch today listening to Jason Fried's TED Talk about Why Work Doesn't Happen At Work while picking at some chicken fingers from Whole Foods.
In response to my announcement of the Elo Cube project, someone on my Facebook wall asked me how I "find time" for all of these activities. I glibly responded that "I hustle every day" and "work at least 60 hours per week." Today, I thought about it more at length and wanted to figure out how many hours per week I spend on activities that most people would consider either "working" or "learning."
In a typical week, I will spend:
- 40 hours at my full-time job working as a developer, programmer, and business analyst
- 10 hours training athletes at my facility
- 5 hours researching general biomechanics/applied anatomy/kinesiology/exercise science
- 5 hours watching lectures on Academic Earth or other open-courseware sites
- 6 hours either writing code or thinking about code for my various projects (Elo Cube, Open Elo System, Biomechanics Database, Kindred Network Algorithm)
That adds up to about 66 hours of work in an average week, which is a bit lower than I suspected. Subtract 56 hours per week for sleeping and sleeping-related activities, 7.5 hours for commuting to/from my full-time job, and that leaves an average of 5.5 hours per day of "free" time. In those 5.5 hours, I personally train myself (though some of this overlaps with training my athletes), spend time with my wife Astrid, play some games (League of Legends, Magic: The Gathering) and try to do all the other errands that I'm supposed to do (which I invariably fail at doing). As summer approaches, I will be playing baseball upwards of 12 hours per week, though I probably will cut back on that this year since I'm having a kid in mid-July!
This is turning into a rather large digression, but it's my blog, so whatever. Approximately ten years ago, my friend Liz asked me a seemingly innocent question: "Kyle - are you good at everything you do?" I proudly answered: "Yes!" It was a badge of honor to select things that I'm good at and pursue them vigorously.
Years went by and I forgot all about this exchange until it dawned on me about five years ago that this is not a good trait to have! Sure, I was above-average in everything I took interest in, but I took interest in a very few things and this stupid limitation that I imposed on myself by refusing to do things that I wasn't good at was limiting my already eroding creativity and intelligence. While I wasn't the smartest guy on the planet and couldn't get inspired by fields I truly didn't understand - typically liberal arts related fields like literature, language, and sociology/psychology - I knew that I had some predisposition for understanding the scientific method. So it would be science that I would turn to in an attempt to be bad at some things while still maintaining interest.
Since then, I've applied my admittedly limited intelligence towards science-related fields. I'm researching topics that I have no shot of being the best (or probably even above-average) at understanding: Classical Mechanics, Kinematics, Kinetics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Kinesiology, Biomechanics, Exercise Science, and so forth. And let me tell you, when you have a stubborn ego and disposition like I do, there's a never-ending sea of knowledge to wade through on topics like "Instantaneous Acceleration and it's Effect on UCL Rupture" or "Time-Measured Changes in Shoulder Flexibility and Pitching Kinematics in Youth Baseball Athletes," much less "Jacques Distler's Critique of Garret's Lisi's Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" which describes Lie algebra E8.
Bringing it back full circle...
"Why do you care?"
As stated above, I can't imagine not caring about these topics. And I understand what it's like to not care about them, because just six years ago I was a troubled young adult who thought he was relatively intelligent but had nowhere to apply it to. This type of thinking is infectious and needs to be purged from the untold millions of 20-something year old graduates (or dropouts) out there. Everyone has a propensity to understand something in this world - be it science, literature, art, history, computers, or any other very broad field. By gradually getting into a field that you find interesting - perhaps you remember being intrigued by the Winged Victory of Samothrace? - and looking at unsolved problems or complex concepts in that field, you will suddenly find yourself immersed in it.
I personally can't understand how people can't watch ten minutes of Walter Lewin's physics lectures and not be instantly hooked! What got me was this simple line:
Any measurement that you make without knowledge of its uncertainty is completely meaningless.
Taken at face value, it's not that interesting. But think about the ramifications of that statement: It is perhaps an elegant and more detailed paraphrase of Richard Feynman's famous statement:
I know how hard it is to know something.
How interesting is it to think about calculating something like joint torque in biomechanics and understanding the crazy uncertainty around it! Acceleration is used to calculate joint torque, and acceleration is a second-order derivation of location. Think about all the potential for error in such a calculation, and realize that we're just talking about torque around a single joint in the body. Relate this to the rest of the world: How hard is it to truly know something infinitely more complex, like the effect of gravity between two objects or why inertia is the way it is? (These are perhaps two unfair topics considering no one knows the definitive answer to both questions!)
For me, the countless interactions in our world described by the most basic concepts of physics occupies my mind all the time. For you, it might be the indescribable nature of macro evolution or the creativity required to even conceive of the most beautiful songs we've heard.
There is no excuse for being intellectually bored or not caring about things in our world. We live in an age where information is plentiful and freely available from the most prestigious of sources on all sorts of topics. Think broadly and spend a single hour per week thinking about this kind of thing, and I bet it will spiral into something ever more interesting to you. Cast aside your prejudices about who is and who is not smart enough to study these subjects and just think.
The worst thing to happen to young people is the stigmatization of the question "Why?" Start asking yourself this question all the time. The speed at which you will realize you know nothing about the most basic interactions in our world is astounding, humbling, and altogether unbelievably amazing.
Hacking: What it Means to Me
I should buy this.
Hacking is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I grew up a social outcast who embraced technology. My family did not come from very rich means, but we lived a typical average American life: Two parents (still together), three boys, placed in the suburbs of a Midwestern city, with pets coming and going. Given that my love for technology came about at an early age (I loved to play Nintendo and even preferred Atari/Bally game systems at times; I adopted the Internet far later than my friends in favor of local BBSes like Virtual Arcade), it wasn't economically feasible to own modern computer equipment at that time. Younger readers of this blog post may not remember, but computers then were exorbitantly expensive and going through a very rapid evolutionary pace. I learned command-line BASIC on Apple IIe computers and very occasionally got to use a friend's 486 computer to play Doom on and surf the web (which was pretty darn boring back then).
As I grew older, my parents purchased a state-of-the-art computer system with 17" monitor (you have no idea how rare this was then), a Pentium 100 Mhz CPU, 1 GB hard drive (also unbelievably large), and 64 MB of RAM if I recall correctly. This Gateway 2000-branded machine probably set them back over $3,000, as my father pulled out all the stops one Christmas for us. It was nothing short of an amazing product, and completely out of left field - my parents didn't lavish expensive gifts on us (my grandfather tended to), so this was quite rare.
I got in my fair share of trouble with it, but the intellectual curiosity of hacking was always there. Programming, not so much - my father bought me Visual Basic 4 one Christmas at my constant nagging, but I never ended up doing much with it. I learned much later in life that programming only interested me if it involved a project that I had to complete myself - writing lines of code to satisfy someone else's ideas or basic examples in a book were no more exciting to me than memorizing poetry.
I recently saw The Social Network, also known as The Facebook Movie. My first reaction to the trailers were: "Oh great, the Facebook movie. I don't want to see this." However, Zuckerberg's background was sufficiently interesting to me, and the people I went with were very good friends, so I decided not to shut it out for no real good reason. There were many times I uncontrollably smiled throughout the movie - when Zuckerberg's hacker mind is being spoken via narration as he frantically hammers out line after line of Perl to download and scrape pictures from Harvard's various repositories; when Eduardo and he discuss the algorithm to rank women on campus (a variation of the Elo system used in Chess and Magic: The Gathering); the blurred poster of the Hacker's Manifesto posted above his dorm room desk; and the code-off where he makes interns take shots for every 10th line of code they write (a genius idea - that's how you keep terse code in your projects). It appealed to me in a way that few people can understand - Zuckerberg at his very core was a hacker.
Hacking does not have a simple definition. My current employer where I do some contract programming/scripting/boring work asked what programming experience I had. I told him that I was a hacker, not a programmer. He responded that there were many levels of programmer - junior, senior, and so forth. I told him that I was aware of the hierarchy installed in most businesses, but that I fell outside of them. I don't write lines of code. I don't check things in to repositories with any sense of responsibility. I hack together lines of code to complete a project in the best way I know how. I steal code from others and stand on the shoulders of giants. As Zuckerberg's actor said in The Social Network, “I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try—but there’s no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie." I do not call myself tall in this regard; it is ridiculous to even suggest it.
No, what I am good at is solving the algorithmic. My resume has gone through various iterations, but the current technology-driven one simply lists a few notable companies I've worked for and the assurance that if your problem is algorithmic in nature, that I can either solve it myself or find you the person you need to solve it. This is perhaps the one thing I am proud of (having dispensed of pride in most other areas). My brain works tirelessly to solve algorithms; it works like a brute force program that can know the salt used in complex problems without needing to guess. It gives me a huge head start in anything iterative. If this makes sense to you, you might need to consult a mental health professional.
My creativity is paired irreversibly with my love for the algorithmic. I have the luxury of having a brain that can conceptualize a problem and the various ways to attack said problem using all sorts of methods - ranging from the simple to the complex. It does this automatically, and attempts to visualize it for others fails utterly and completely. What I consider to be "creative" is not what nearly anyone else would call it, but over time I've come to understand that how I reverse engineer problems is the source of my creativity.
This love for the algorithmic does not apply only in math, science, and computers - in fact, those are the areas where I am most weak. Like Kirtan Loor in the Rogue Squadron books (talk about a nerd reference; at least Zac will appreciate it), I rely too heavily on my memory and my previous achievements in those fields. This hampers me and drags me down, often completely turning off my creativity. It is when I approach unknown subjects that this love for the algorithmic truly blossoms. Two examples follow.
Recently I found myself in the position of needing to figure out how to crack a wireless network (my own, of course - it would be illegal otherwise!). I knew that WEP was insecure, but didn't know much about the technology. Doing some research, I found it utterly fascinating exactly how insecure it was and how easy it would be to acquire the key. Moving on to WPA-TKIP, I read tutorial after tutorial with poorly written instructions that didn't really help me - so I moved on to all the boring stuff. Understanding the root problem rather than duplicating someone's instructions always worked better for me and provided me with a better sense of accomplishment when I finished it, anyway. In many senses, cracking WPA was easier, even if they used TKIP since WPA was still based on the Pre-Shared Key (PSK) concept. What you needed to do was deauthorize a connection, forcing them to re-initiate the handshake with the router, capture the handshake, and then crack this handshake to get the key. The problem, of course, is that you have to brute force the key with rainbow tables, word lists, or outright guess it. Cracking it on a standard powerful desktop could take days, if not weeks. Enter WPA Cracker - a cloud-based solution that takes the handshake and runs it against their 400+ CPU cluster, giving you a result (if there is one) within an hour - for $17. Amazing. This is one of the ways how technology excites me - leveraging the use of redundant and cheap resources en masse to provide distributed computing power never before conceptualized, much less implemented!
I have thought long and hard about the biomechanics of throwing a baseball. This is incredibly boring for nearly everyone I know outside of a handful of crazies. The very nature of this industry promotes closed-minded analysis and protecting the data that universities and other institutions collect. Kinesiologists and others who do studies on pitchers in their $200,000+ sports labs are not interested in sharing their methods or data with a Seattle-based hacker who is trying to build his own private motion capture laboratory on a budget of $1,000. To me, this project represents what I believe hacking to be - freeing information from those who would desperately seek to protect it for their own selfish means. Doctors and people high up in academia look down on me for approaching this problem in ways that no other person would consider valid - a college dropout self-studying from the same texts available at premier universities, hiring interns who are far more experienced, and experimenting on his own body. But wait: All of a sudden, we aren't just talking about hacking, are we? What I feel I am doing with the motion capture lab and the desire to make as much of it as possible open source represents the true nature of science. For science to be truly available to everyone, it must be repeatable and verifiable. I plan on making my lab on a shoestring budget and duplicating the efforts for others who want to follow in my footsteps. My interests go beyond the entrepreneurial and into the scientific - even if the others do not see me as their equal because of missing letters after my name.
Hacking is not something that can be defined. It manifests itself differently in each person. To attempt to describe it with a static definition would be like telling someone that a simple definition exists for the concept of creativity, or love. Hacking is a way of thinking - a way of building and deconstructing - in paths that are annoyingly incomplete, terribly cluttered, and horribly documented.
And ruthlessly efficient.
New Business Cards!
At the risk of sounding like Christian Bale from American Psycho, I love business cards. I have some crappy stock ones for my baseball training business in Seattle and I just received some sweet new glossy ones for my personal training business at Experience Fitness.
There's something awesome about having a card that sums up a part of your life and makes for easy contact going forward. I know everyone is going digital, but despite my love for web development, data analysis, and technology in general, I'm still an old-fashioned guy in a lot of respects.
Baseball Layoff
Due to the inclement weather over the past week, a few of my baseball games have been canceled. Combined with the light schedule of this week, it leaves me with a rare stretch where I don't have more than one game in a week. This is sad, because I love to play tons of baseball from July-August (it gets a bit old towards September) when the weather is beautiful. I've been compensating by taking a bunch of batting practice and working out more, but it's not the same.
Fall league is just around the corner while one of my summer leagues is wrapping up. Can't believe the off-season is nearly upon us! It's bittersweet, I think; the offseason represents the end of baseball for a few months, but gives me a much-needed opportunity to train very hard for the next season and to improve my strength metrics. I plan on cutting weight to about 210 lbs by then, and I'd like to have a double bodyweight back squat, a bodyweight bench press, and a 500 lb. deadlift by the end of the offseason.
Is it doable? Only time will tell, I suppose.
Me
Wisdom
Latest Driveline Baseball Posts
- Pitching Mechanics Myths: Chin to Target, Release Ball Closer to the Plate
- How to Use the Glove Side in Pitching
- Biomechanics Explained: The Difficulty of Measurement
- Want to Ask Us Questions? Stay in Touch on Twitter (drivelinebases)
- Free Weighted Baseball Training Program!
Kyle’s Hardball Times Articles
- Fastball mechanics: The hardest and softest throwers
- Jason Vargas, the twist, and the intent to throw hard
- How baseball failed Steve Delabar
- A pitcher breaking the mold
- The science of scouting: A biomechanical look at Gerrit Cole
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