Last Wednesday in the fifth inning at a lopsided Mets-Dodgers game in Los Angeles, the winners of a James Loney-John Maine matchup were sitting in the stands. With the Dodgers trailing, 11-0, Mr. Loney fouled off five pitches before hitting a relatively meaningless double. Two of those foul balls, though, were caught by glove-less friends Glen Walker and Joe Castro, who were sitting in adjacent seats at field level between third base and home.
“By the game’s end, the pair were clutching their baseballs and trying to calculate the odds of back-to-back fouls landing side-by-side in the stands,” the Los Angeles Times reported. ” ” ‘It’s got to be one in 10 million,’ decided Castro. ‘It has to be millions to one,’ said Walker, who is a reporter and news anchor at television stations KCBS-2 and KCAL-9.”
Not content with their ballpark estimates, the Times reporter consulted with USC mathematician Kenneth Alexander, who calculated that the probability of a pair of adjacent fans catching foul balls in a single game was about one in 10,000. “He cautioned, however, that his specialty is probability theory in mathematical physics,” the Times wrote. “With Wednesday’s 12-1 loss to the Mets, the Dodgers are probably wishing mathematical physics could tell them the probability that they’ll soon regain their momentum.”
I’ll skip over the dubious notion of momentum in sports and stick with the foul-ball probability, which is itself rather hard to estimate. A proper calculation would account for the distribution of foul balls in the stands, and the particular batter-pitcher matchup.
Repoz
Posted: May 14, 2008 at 10:10 AM |
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One of the assumptions no one mentions in the article or comments is how some seats are much, much more likely to get foul balls than others.
In fact, given the fact that his friend had just caught a foul ball, the odds of the other guy catching one on the next pitch got much higher IMHO. Bayes' law and all that.
It referenced at the end of this interview, for example.
Of course. Of freakin' course. Daves
I attended a game recently with non-fans, and one advantage of that is you get to follow the foul balls with curiosity ("will we get one?"). A 16-count for balls going in to the stands seems about right to me.
Considering a prototypical modern stadium, with wide lower decks, a small middle tier (press-box level), and a steep upper deck, perhaps 14 of them landed in the lower deck, 2 in the middle deck, and 0 in the upper seats. Of the lower ones, perhaps 3 landed beyond the bases in the outfield-flanking seats.
So, my educated guess on distribution is that it is heavily weighted towards height (the lower the better) and lateral distance (the closer to home plate, the better). Once Pf/x is perfected, the folks in charge should direct their energy to answering this question once and for all.
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