Baseball Has a Strange Math Issue
My last post was about the defensive capabilities of MLB catchers in 2023. I mentioned that there was more to come. As I was researching the follow-up post, I came across something bizarre. As soon as I stop violently shaking my head back and forth, I will show you what I found.
This post was supposed to be about framing pitches. Some catchers are very good at fooling umpires into calling strikes on pitches that are actually balls. There is lots of excellent data to quantify the ability of any catcher to do this. As you might guess, this is a precious skill that any team would want to have in their catcher.
As I reviewed the data and put together a strategy to analyze and visualize it for the post, I realized that I needed to draw pictures of home base, more commonly called home plate. Why home base, then? That is what it is called in the official baseball rule book. How did I end up on a web page showing those rules? That is an excellent question.
I searched for the dimensions of home plate; it wasn’t something I had committed to memory. Trust me, I know the numbers now, and I doubt I will ever forget. Here’s why…
The following paragraph is taken from Official Baseball Rules, 2024 edition, published by the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball.
2.02 Home Base. Home base shall be marked by a five-sided slab of whitened rubber. It shall be a 17-inch square with two of the corners removed so that one edge is 17 inches long, two adjacent sides are 8½ inches and the remaining two sides are 12 inches and set at an angle to make a point
So, what’s the big deal? The rule book describes an impossible figure. The shape described does not, and cannot, exist. Unbelievable, isn’t it? Look at the drawing I conjured up.
Figure 1. Home plate as it should be and home plate as described in rule book.
I suppose a lawyer could litigate this. It seems that the intent was for the angle formed at the point to be 90 degrees, which it clearly is not when following the description from the rule book. It takes slightly more than 12 inches to meet the requirements of Pythagoras and his ubiquitous theorem. Is Major League Baseball concerned about this? Apparently not. Am I concerned that they have fudged a famous trigonometry theorem? I’ll crank up some Mozart and mull it over for a bit. My guess is I won’t lose much sleep.
