America's pastime's coefficients of change

Baseball aficionados and die-hard fans, despite what's foisted on the reputation of America's pastime, perpetually compare today's players to those of yesteryear. Let's look at the glamorous signpost of the game, the home run. According to baseball statistics those who had 30 or more home runs in a season since 1920 crossed home plate 1,094 times. In the last 13 years, 40 percent of those who hit for the circuit skewed the previous 76-year-old average far beyond the natural evolution of the game and the predictable transformation of America's sport.

So what's changed? I argue that it's not the usage of banned substances but the innovations of technology to enhance excitement. It's the physical properties of coefficients. The coefficient of elasticity is the ratio of the applied stress, the bat hitting the ball, to the change in the shape of the elastic body. The higher the coefficient the more resilience to the body and the more resistant to deformity the ball becomes. The coefficient of restitution is the fractional value representing the ratio of velocities before and after impact. The higher the coefficient of the two bodies upon collision the greater the bounce.

The game has transformed itself from a sport to a business where the home run is the main attraction. The long ball has far overshadowed precision pitching, golden glove fielding, base stealing gymnastics, and game winning strategies. Of course, this is where the money is, for the team and player alike.

So do we as the diminishing audience of America's game prefer the coefficient of elasticity, to permit further distancing us from baseball as it once was or do we choose to hang on to a fragment of the coefficient of restitution, to attempt to restore it to what we once knew it to be?

James D. Cook

Streamwood