MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

It's interesting to me, who is not a baseball player but a software engineer, that even at the level of professional sports the solution is not to just train the athletes to swing the ideal bat "correctly" but to redesign the bat to be sub-optimal but such that when the players use it "wrong" the right thing happens.

The physicists and swing coaches and trainers and teammates have probably been telling Volpe and Chisholm for almost 2 decades to make contact at the tip of the bat instead of closer to their hands. But the solution turned out to be adjusting the bat and not the swing. Fascinating.

I can sit in my office and deliberate on the location of buttons and indicators on the screen and come up with the objectively best arrangement per ISA 101 high-performance HMI standards, but if operators keep making messes because their intuition about that system is wrong, maybe I should just change the way the machine operates to match.

The biomechanics involved are insane. You are hitting a baseball-sized object (ha) moving at 90+ mph with massive break, often very late and over two axes, with something a couple of inches in diameter, and need to make decisions and react and adjust your swing path in a handful of milliseconds. And that’s just to make contact, let alone good contact, let alone contact that can find a patch of grass.

It’s the single hardest skill in competitive team sports in my opinion.

> Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It's 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week - just one - a gorp... you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes... you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week... and you're in Yankee Stadium.

(Crash Davis)

Basically, these guys have such fine tuned biomechanics for hitting a baseball with just a few hundred milliseconds to decide wether to swing and where to swing, that trying to change their approach to hit further down the bat might ruin their hitting if they mess up. Far easier to shift the sweet spot.

Its not that they just need to get closer to the ball, their estimation if where a ball will strike their bat is slightly off.

I wish I could find it--I think it was on the Uber engineering blog--but I remember reading a post in which they talked about choosing a less "optimal"/"efficient" implementation in order to better cater to the available hiring pool: it's cheaper and easier to throw more money at hardware, than conjure up the necessary engineering talent

That resonated with me as I turned back around and gazed at the elegant, efficient, and inscrutable-and-difficult-to-debug Reactive-Extensions-based backend I was working on. Maybe Task<List<T>> would have been "better" after all

It makes more sense if you consider the baseball player as a multimillion-dollar factory that cannot be brought down for maintenance.

Volpe and Chisholm have honed and fine-tuned their swings over 20 years to produce results good enough to vault them into the top few hundred in the world at that particular craft.

They have a lot riding on that existing swing. Pro baseball is an unforgiving endeavor in which small edges add up over the course of a six month season, and the rewards for skill follow a power law distribution such that being just a bit better has millions of dollars attached to it, but becoming just a bit worse can also mean losing millions of dollars.

Changing swing path to get contact on a slightly different portion of the bat on a particular kind of pitch, possibly when looking for another pitch, perhaps just in particular counts, requires a lot of offseason work and carries no guarantees. The risk is similar to a from-scratch rewrite where the old code is thrown away; a very large portion of the time the resulting hitter ends up unplayable in the majors.

Tweaking the bat shape, on the other hand, is a micro-optimization akin to a bug fix whose rollout is behind a feature flag: undoing it is as easy at pulling a different bat from the rack.

More stark is the difference between 700 and 800 OPS …