Tag: baseball

Roid Age: steroids in sport and the paradox of pharmacological puritanism

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The following post is based on a lecture I gave in the course, ‘Drugs Across Cultures,’ on steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. A very-beta version of a Prezi is available for the lecture on my Prezi account, but it still needs updating. I’m eventually hoping to do a webcast version of the lecture, so I’d love to hear your feedback — the lecture isn’t as detailed as this post. The original post is from 9 July 2012 on the PLOS Blogs Neuroanthropology, a site that was closed down (archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20170907050452/http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2012/07/09/roid-age-steroids-in-sport-and-the-paradox-of-pharmacological-puritanism/)

Introduction

In 1998, when I was living in New York, my family managed to get tickets to a baseball game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs. I had been a Cardinals fan since before I ate solid food, and 1998 was a very good year to catch a Cards-Cubs game. Baseball fans around the US, still demoralized after the 1994 players strike forced the cancellation of the World Series, were thrilled in 1998 by a chase for the record in US Major League Baseball (MLB) for the most home runs in a season by a single player. Fans flocked back to stadiums for a carnival of power hitting that summer.

When I went to the game, Cardinal Mark McGwire and Cub Sammy Sosa were both on pace to break the record of 61 home runs in a season set by Roger Maris, a record that had stood for almost four decades. By the end of the year, both McGwire and Sosa would shatter the previous mark. Sosa finished that season with 66, McGwire with 70. The afternoon that I flew in from New York for the game, both McGwire and Sosa hit home runs, and I had one of my best days watching professional baseball. St. Louis was drunk on the excitement; ‘Big Mac’ jerseys were selling like school uniforms in July, and the hot, humid St. Louis air was crackling with the energy (or maybe we were all just drunk on the insane pollen count). After the sordid spectacle of millionaire players and multi-multi-millionaire owners kicking sand on each other and taking their toys home a few years earlier, it felt good to be a baseball fan again.

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Catching fly balls: taking a step forward

Nolan Catholic High Lady Vikings catcher Martha Thomas zeroes the apparent acceleration of a pop-up
Nolan Catholic High Lady Vikings catcher Martha Thomas zeroes the apparent acceleration of a pop-up
Dan Peterson, probably my favourite blogger on sports science, has a recent piece in Science Daily on How Baseball Players Catch Fly Balls. He usually posts on his excellent blog, Sports Are 80 Percent Mental. His post, as usual, is excellent, but I wanted to take issue with the slightest of details (because that’s just how I am): why do novice outfielders often take a step forward when the crack of a bat and the launch of a ball indicates that a fly ball has just been hit in their direction?

As a former and largely inept outfielder for the Ascension Catholic Church ‘Steamrollers,’ 2nd grade and under team (I was more of a junior soccer player), I well remember our coach, Dr. Wickersham, telling us repeatedly, and to little effect, ‘don’t start running forward until you know the pop-up is going to fall in front of you.’ I also clearly remember the sinking feeling when, after failing to heed his advice, a fly ball flew over my head as I charged toward it, ultimately landing almost precisely where I had been standing the instant that ball was hit.

Peterson discusses a recent paper in the journal, Human Movement Science, ‘Catching fly balls: A simulation study of the Chapman strategy,’ by Dimant Kistemakera and colleagues. Kistemakera and his team set out to test the slight variations between the trajectories fielders took when running to intercept a fly ball, and the trajectories predicted by Seville Chapman’s ‘strategy’ of using the acceleration of the ball in one’s vertical field to control whether one was too close or too far from home plate to make the catch.

Continue reading “Catching fly balls: taking a step forward”