In Baseball, the Nerd Offensive Has a New Soldier

For casual baseball fans worried about looking ignorant at the water cooler, there's an evergreen fallback for conversation: The Yankees are good this year.

But in case anyone doubts Major League Baseball's cash-laden dominators, who have won a record 26 World Series titles, mathematician Bruce Bukiet can prove it with a lot of numbers.

As the website LiveScience.com reported yesterday, Bukiet's mathematical model calculates the probabilities for each hitter-pitcher match-up and can therefore predict the outcome of individual games. By his calculations, the Yankees will win 110 of their 162 games this year, a very good season in baseball.

"I do only what the math tells me," Bukiet told News Desk in an interview.

Bukiet has been doing this for a few years, and archives his past predictions, made prior to Opening Day. According to News Desk's scoreboard, he was 91.6 percent accurate in the 2006 season.

Bukiet is but one soldier in what might be called the "nerd offensive" in professional sports--a rigorous trolling of the statistics that replaces conventional wisdom from the baseball diamond with basic risk analysis.

The reason baseball lends itself to this kind of model is because it is largely organized as "a sequence of one-on-one events," Bukiet says--that is, a duel between the pitcher and the batter.

Baseball fits neatly into a concept of probability theory known as a Markov Process, Bukiet says, in which the likelihood of a future event is determined only the present situation, regardless of how that situation arose.

As he puts it, "You don't need to know how you got to first and third with two outs in the seventh" to calculate the probable outcomes of the inning, based on who's pitching, who's up, and who's in the field.

Bukiet, who earned his Ph.D. researching explosives, is a strong advocate for the ability of math to tell us something about the physical world.

"It's not like, wow, I proved something about infinite dimensional space," he says. "Baseball is kind of my little angle to get this out to people."

--Chris Wilson