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June 28, 2013

Strange But True!

Q. What was the point of baseball researchers studying 4,566,468 pitcher-batter matchups covering 57,293 Major League games since 1952?

A. Richard Larrick and colleagues were interested in finding out the exact probability of a batter being hit by a pitch under various circumstances, says David G. Myers in “Exploring Psychology, Ninth Edition.” Lab experiments have shown that people made miserable will often resort to making others miserable — called the “frustration-aggression principle.” Frustration creates anger, which in turn can spark aggression. In one study of 27,667 hit-by-pitch incidents from 1960 to 2004, batters were most likely to be hit when: (1) pitchers were frustrated due to the previous batter hitting a home run; (2) the current batter had hit a home run on his previous at bat; (3) a teammate of the pitcher had been hit by a pitch in the previous half inning.


 
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