The Light Lens: Field of DREAMS

by T. Touris –

Ah, green grass, the crack of the bat, the pleasant pop of the ball smacking leather. Almost every American is comforted by these signs and knows that spring has finally arrived.

Following the lead of Major League Baseball, local little leagues are implementing a new system this year to help improve the performance of future statistical stars.

This system, Data Reduction Evaluation and Analysis Management System (DREAMS), is fine tuned to squeeze out every bit of performance from the specialized athletic units (players) making up the cooperative, win seeking network (team).

Each team will now have a cell phone app as head coach, along with a human assistant coach to interface with irate and bewildered parents. The first team meeting will go something like this:

Hello, I am your new coach ABNERD 2.0 (Autonomous Baseball NERD); your assistant coach is Mr. McFeely.

This is going to be great year. Everyone is going to get to try new and exciting roles on the field. Although you will each have an assigned position, we will use tactical shifting to improve our situational defensive strength. What does this   mean? Well, although Roger will be our third baseman, when a batter’s spray chart warrants it, we may shift him near the snack stand along the right field foul line.

I have some more great news: this year all of you will get to pitch. We need as many pitching specialists as possible and each one of you will be carefully evaluated so we can apply your specific strengths in important situations. For example, Jimmy, you will be used to pitch to batters with an average swing launch angle of 15 degrees, an OPS between .7000 to .7666, height around 4’6” and blue eyes. We’re still crunching the number on brown-eyed batters. Green-eyed batters may prove difficult to analyze due to the low sample rate.

Using this approach, almost everyone will get the opportunity to pitch in each game! Coach McFeely, please reassure the parents that we will do our utmost to keep games under five hours long.

Any questions? Good. Now go out there and have fun!