The pitcher who conquered MLB's best hitters

In 2004 and '05, Finch hosted a regular segment on Fox's This Week in Baseball in which she traveled to major league training camps and transformed the world's best baseball hitters into clumsy hacks. "Girls hit this stuff?" asked an incredulous Mike Cameron, the Mariners' outfielder, after he missed a pitch by half a foot.

When seven-time National League MVP Barry Bonds saw Finch at the Major League All-Star Game, he walked through a throng of reporters to talk trash to her. "So, Barry, when do I get to face the best?" Finch asked.

"Whenever you want to," Bonds replied confidently. "You faced all them little chumps.... You gotta face the best.

"You can't be pretty and good and not face another handsome guy who's good," Bonds added, spreading his peacock feathers. He then told Finch to bring a protective net because, he said, "you're going to need it with me.... I'll hit you."

"There's only been one guy who touched it," Finch replied.

"Touch it?" Bonds said, laughing. "If it comes across that plate, believe me, I'ma touch it. I'ma touch it hard."

"I'll have my people call your people, and we'll set it up," Finch said.

"Oh, it's on!" Bonds said. "You can call me direct, girl. I take my challenges direct.... We'll televise it too, on national television. I want the world to see."

So Finch traveled to Arizona to face Bonds in spring training, and after he watched several of her pitches fly by, the raillery stopped. He insisted that the cameras not film him batting against her. Finch shot pitch after pitch past Bonds as his Giants teammates pronounced them strikes. "That's a ball!" Bonds pleaded, to which one of his teammates replied, "Barry, you've got 12 umpires back here."

Bonds watched dozens of strikes go by without so much as swinging. Not until Finch began to tell Bonds what pitches were coming did he tap a meek foul ball a few feet. He taunted her, "Go on, throw the cheese!" She did, and blew it right past him.

Finch visited Alex Rodriguez, who was then starring for the Rangers, at another spring-training park, in 2003, and Rodriguez watched over her shoulder as she threw warmup pitches to a Texas bullpen catcher. The catcher missed three of the first five throws. Before Rodriguez stepped into the batter's box, he made it clear he wouldn't dare swing at any of Finch's pitches. He leaned forward and told her, "No one's going to make a fool out of me."

An excerpt from David Epstein's new book The Sports Gene, which I'm about a third of the way through and enjoying quite a bit. 

One of the first mysteries he tackles is this one: why did MLB's best hitters, who have to hit baseballs that travel to home plate in about 400 milliseconds from just under 60 feet 6 inches away, struggle to even make contact with a much larger softball traveling to home plate in the same amount of time (thrown slower at 68mph, but from a shorter distance).

Epstein notes that the average time for a major league hitter to initiate muscular action is about 200 milliseconds, meaning baseball players must decide to swing at a baseball before it's even halfway to home plate. To make that decision, baseball players try to anticipate the pitch being thrown by looking at the pitcher's delivery motion. 

This explains why certain pitches and pitchers are so effective. Take Mariano Rivera, for example. For much of his career, he threw just one pitch, the cutter. How can a pitcher survive throwing one pitch such a high percentage of the time? In fact, this season he's thrown the cutter 89% of the time. 

The key is late movement. The batter has to decide to swing at the ball and where to swing before the pitch is halfway to home plate, but the pitch tends to move laterally and downwards, away from the arm side, very late in its path to the plate. By then it's too late for a hitter to adjust his swing path.  The same principle applies to the slider which may be the single pitch most responsible for the rise in strikeouts in the modern era. It comes in looking like a fastball, and the best sliders move both sideways and away from the arm side very late, too late for a hitter to do anything about his swing path.

Why is Yu Darvish such a tough pitcher to hit? Part of it is his filthy and broad repertoire of pitches, but another is the fact that he manages to deliver every pitch to multiple locations with the same exact motion, leaving the hitter with fewer cues to try to guess which pitch is coming. This animated GIF that circulated earlier this year illustrates this deception beautifully. 

Even skills that appear to be purely instinctive, such as jumping to rebound a basketball after a missed shot, are grounded in learned perceptual expertise and a database of knowledge about how subtle shifts in a shooter's body alter the trajectory of the ball. Without that database, which can be built only through rigorous practice, every athlete is a chess master facing a random board, or Albert Pujols facing Jennie Finch: He is stripped of the information that allows him to predict the future.

Since Pujols had no mental database of Finch's body movements, her pitch tendencies or even the spin of a softball, he could not predict what was coming, and he was left reacting at the last moment. And Pujols's simple reaction speed is downright quotidian. When scientists at Washington University in St. Louis tested him, perhaps the greatest hitter of his era was in the 66th percentile for simple reaction time compared with a random sample of college students.

It's true, some hitters will guess that a certain pitch is coming, and if they guess incorrectly they can look silly, letting a fastball right down the middle go by without lifting the bat off their shoulders. Being labeled a "guess hitter" was a stigma.

From Epstein's summary of how hitters operate at a neurological level, however, it turns out almost every hitter is guessing in some ways, from the moment the pitcher starts his motion to just after the baseball is released.

Asiana Flight 214

Patrick Smith of Ask the Pilot  fame provided an informed critique of many of the hasty judgments people grasped at wildly after Asiana Flight 214 crashed at SFO. Among those:

Lastly, we're hearing murmurs already about the fact that Asiana Airlines hails from Korea, a country with a checkered past when it comes to air safety. Let's nip this storyline in the bud. In the 1980s and 1990s, that country's largest carrier, Korean Air, suffered a spate of fatal accidents, culminating with the crash of Flight 801 in Guam in 1997. The airline was faulted for poor training standards and a rigid, authoritarian cockpit culture. The carrier was ostracized by many in the global aviation community, including its airline code-share partners. But Korean aviation is very different today, following a systemic and very expensive overhaul of the nation’s civil aviation system. A 2008 assessment by ICAO, the civil aviation branch of the United Nations, ranked Korea's aviation safety standards, including its pilot training standards, as nothing less than the highest in the world, beating out more than 100 other countries. As they should be, Koreans are immensely proud of this turnaround, and Asiana Airlines, the nation's No. 2 carrier, had maintained an impeccable record of both customer satisfaction and safety.

Whatever happened on final approach into SFO, I highly doubt that it was anything related to the culture of Korean air safety in 2013. Plane crashes are increasingly rare the world over. But they will continue to happen from time to time, and no airline or country is 100 percent immune. 

Malcolm Gladwell arguably did more than anyone to popularize the theory that Korean culture lay at the root of Korean Air's poor safety record in the 1980's and 1990's. In this interview with CNN Money, he summarized his theory from his book Outliers:

F: You share a fascinating story about culture and airline safety.

G: Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots. No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S.

But Boeing (BA, Fortune 500) and Airbus design modern, complex airplanes to be flown by two equals. That works beautifully in low-power-distance cultures [like the U.S., where hierarchies aren't as relevant]. But in cultures that have high power distance, it's very difficult.

I use the case study of a very famous plane crash in Guam of Korean Air. They're flying along, and they run into a little bit of trouble, the weather's bad. The pilot makes an error, and the co-pilot doesn't correct him. But once Korean Air figured out that their problem was cultural, they fixed it.

A fairly thorough rebuttal to Gladwell's theory was posted at the blog Ask a Korean:

First, the way in which Gladwell quoted the transcript is severely misleading. This is the full transcript, which goes from pp. 185 to 187 of the NTSB report:

CAPTAIN: 어... 정말로... 졸려서... (불분명) [eh... really... sleepy... (unintelligible words)]

FIRST OFFICER: 그럼요 [Of course]

FIRST OFFICER: 괌이 안 좋네요 기장님 [Captain, Guam condition is no good]

FIRST OFFICER: Two nine eighty-six

CAPTAIN: 야! 비가 많이 온다 [Uh, it rains a lot]

CAPTAIN: (unintelligible words)

CAPTAIN: 가다가 이쯤에서 한 20 마일 요청해 [Request twenty miles deviation later on]

FIRST OFFICER: 네 [yes]

CAPTAIN: ... 내려가면서 좌측으로 [... to the left as we are descending]

(UNCLEAR SPEAKER): (chuckling, unintelligible words)

FIRST OFFICER: 더 오는 것같죠? 이 안에. [Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here?]

(emphases mine)

Note the difference between the full transcript, and the way Gladwell presented the transcript. Gladwell only quoted the first two lines and the last line of this sequence, omitting many critical lines in the process. In doing so, Gladwell wants to create an impression that the first officer underwent some period of silent contemplation, and decided to warn the captain of the poor weather conditions in an indirect, suggestive manner. 

The full transcript reveals that this is clearly not the case. The first officer spoke up directly, clearly, and unmistakably:  "Captain, Guam condition is no good." It is difficult to imagine how a person could be more direct about the poor weather condition. Further, there was no silent contemplation by the first officer. Nearly three minutes elapse during this sequence, during the captain and the first officer chatted constantly. And it is the captain who first brings up the fact that it is raining a great deal: "Uh, it rains a lot." In this context, it is clear that the first officer is engaged in some friendly banter about the rain, not some indirect, ominous warning about the flight conditions.

To be fair to Gladwell, when asked about whether he thought his theory from Outliers came into play in the case of Asiana Flight 214, he did not bite. 

We asked Malcolm Gladwell for his thoughts on the use of his essay in the particular context of the Asiana crash. "I can understand why my Outliers chapter has been of interest, given how central cockpit communication issues are in plane crashes," Gladwell told The Atlantic Wire in an email, adding, "My sense is that we should wait for the full report on the crash before drawing any conclusions about its cause." As for the applicability of his work to the recent Asiana crash, Gladwell noted that his essay was specific to the problems (and solutions) of one airline — Korean Air, "which I think did an extraordinary job of addressing the cultural issues involved in pilot communication. This was a crash involving a completely different airline," he said. 

The NTSB has yet to issue any formal assessment of what happened that day. I happened to arrive at SFO for a flight to Paris just a few hours after the crash occurred, and we could see the wreckage in the distance from our gate. Our flight was delayed by 9 hours, and we finally took off at around 9pm that night.

Our plane turned onto the runway and accelerated towards takeoff. The moment just before our wheels left the ground, I saw, just out the window to the left, the wreckage of Asiana Flight 214, sitting just off our runway, illuminated by some giant spotlights, like a giant burned out metallic skeleton that had just been dug out of the earth.

Racial diversity in American cities

I killed a good half hour playing with this racial diversity dot map. It visualizes some of the spatial racial distribution of cities that you can only intuit from ground level as a resident. While a city may seem quite integrated and diverse, it isn't until you zoom in that you see that what looks like a diverse blob of people is really a series of segregated neighborhoods. 

One personal hunch, though, is that how diverse a city feels is not just based on how segregated the population is based on their place of residence but how much those populations interact in day to day life, and that is a function of city density and the developmental maturity of the city's public transportation. While New York City looks like Chicago or San Francisco or other big cities in being a collection of segregated neighborhoods, it felt like the most diverse city I've ever lived in because those populations crossed paths on the city streets and subways every day in high numbers. 

Thomas Schelling's Segregation Model, one of the more powerful agent based models I've ever studied, shows how the extreme segregation of American cities might arise from much milder racial preferences. It's a critical model to study, one that is useful to keep in mind when trying to avoid a variant of fundamental attribution error when trying to explain how something that builds over time ended up in a bad state.

This report (PDF) from 2011 studies long term racial segregation trends in America and comes to this conclusion:

The 2010 Census offers new information on changes in residential segregation in metropolitan regions across the country as they continue to become more diverse. We take a long view, assessing trends since 1980. There are two main findings: 1) the slow pace of lowering black-white segregation has continued, but there is now some change in the traditional Ghetto Belt cities of the Northeast and Midwest; and 2) the rapidly growing Hispanic and Asian populations are as segregated today as they were thirty years ago, and their growth is creating more intense ethnic enclaves in many parts of the country.

Plagiarism in the age of the internet

One more case study on the impact of what the internet does best: distribute information. 

Twitter user @prodigalsam  has come under heavy fire for building up his Twitter follower count to over 100,000 by plagiarising the jokes of other comedians. He had reached 130,000 followers, though the recent controversy seems to have pushed that back down under 125,000, still a hefty number.

Given the massive volumes of text being indexed on the internet, plagiarism seems like an increasingly shaky proposition unless you're flying so far under the radar that no one notices.

Not a scientific study, just a hunch: fields where artists depend on originality to make a name for themselves are much more sensitive to enforcing norms around plagiarism. Magic and comedy are two fields where a code of honor is enforced with great intensity by the practitioners themselves.

As an example, read this great article I cited here a year ago in Esquire about Teller of Penn and Teller fame going after magicians who've stolen some of his tricks. 

Your lobster roll is overpriced

A glut of lobster in the ocean has driven its wholesale price down, yet restaurants have kept lobster dishes on the menu at historical high price points. James Surowiecki explains the many reasons why, including this:

Lobster hasn’t always been a high-end product. In Colonial New England, it was a low-class food, in part because it was so abundant: servants, as a condition of their employment, insisted on not being fed lobster more than three times a week. In the nineteenth century, it became generally popular, but then, as overharvesting depleted supplies, it got to be associated with the wealthy (who could afford it). In the process, high prices became an important part of lobster’s image. And, as with many luxury goods, expense is closely linked to enjoyment. Studies have shown that people prefer inexpensive wines in blind taste tests, but that they actually get more pleasure from drinking wine they are told is expensive. If lobster were priced like chicken, we might enjoy it less.

Restaurants also worry about the message that discounting sends. Studies dating back to the nineteen-forties show that when people can’t objectively evaluate a product before they buy it (as is the case with a meal) they often assume a correlation between price and quality. Since most customers don’t know what’s been happening to the wholesale price of lobster, cutting the price could send the wrong signal: people might think your lobster is inferior to that of your competitors. A 1996 study found that restaurants wouldn’t place more orders with wholesalers even if lobster prices fell twenty-five per cent. As the study’s authors put it, “A low price creates suspicion.” This helps explain one of the interesting strategies that restaurants have adopted to take advantage of the lower price for lobster: they keep the price of lobster entrées high, but add lower-priced items—lobster bisque, lobster mac-and-cheese, a lobster B.L.T—to the menu. That way, they can generate more business without endangering lobster’s exclusive image.

I wonder if lobster prices remain high at seafood markets, or even Costco. They don't have to engage is menu price portfolio construction, but the perceptual illusion that higher priced lobster tastes better still exists.