baseball, control

[Daniel Stein]

Lindsay Gillies wrote

>re the pitcher's mound:
>physics and the archetypes can (perhaps must) coexist.  while helping the
>non-nolan pitchers, the mound is also a site for activity more anciently
>rooted than the batter up home plate.  "Batter up!"---but who controls the
>game?  Who originates the action?  The basic strategy of the game is never
>discussed at home plate---managers "go out to the mound".

Somebody wanted more "baseball talk"....

As pointed out, baseball has multiple centers of action, which the
spectator can easily miss if sucked into somnolence by the relatively
regular (and therefore predictable) -- hypnotizing sinusoid between pitcher
and catcher...But, yeah, the pitcher dominates, within the constraints of
what the catcher requests...and if the batter doesn't respond, it's a
simple game of 'catch', and the pitcher only need throw strikes...this is
called 'control' by the pitching coaches....however, this 'control'
inevitably fails because of nonlinear dynamical effects (even if pitchers
were machines, - and there was one Twilight Zone episode that of course
failed to note this....) Then the modulation begins to degrade...or develop
sidebands, or noisy little pips, and the control filters get more and more
complex....

So the catcher, manager and/or coaches go out to confer "on the mound" - as
a "strategy" it's usually a late response, to fix something that seems to
be going wrong, such as even a SINGLE runner on base, something we should
be able to have a pre-programmed response to, since we know Who's coming up
to bat, and What's in store...there's the obvious counterforce to this,
too, a basically binary logic as 1st and 3rd base coaches and the dugout
send weird signals (that look like muscles manifesting the effects of brain
disorders) to the batter and runners on base, do this if that but not
if....or do this and this if...etc. And the poor guy on the "mound" has a
whole bunch of internal cross-talk going into his output signal...

You know, the more I think about it, baseball seems analogous to the
parallel distributed computing environment (parts operating indepedently
under the overarching code) that's becoming more and more common as an
alternative to the monolithic mainframe
(US football? heavily orchestrated mayhem impelled by the QB-CPU, or the
play brought in from the bench, telling the ball carrier when to zigzag,
and the only creativity comes from the "broken" play). Well, enough of
THAT...

Where DOES the opposite-field home run come from? (besides home plate,
ha-ha!)  Yep, no one (individual) REALLY controls the game until the final
out is made, and all the processors have checked in...even with two out in
the bottom ninth, behind in the count, ergodicity is missing; there are
still infinitely-many unexplored regions of the game's phase space...

Anyone out there able to cite anywhere that TP has artistically explored
the implications of physical nonlinearities - he must be uniquely qualified
to articulate this - most don't have the combined command of language and
mathematics...but then I am a latecomer to this discussion, and y'all may
have been over this stuff too many times already...Historically speaking,
GR was published 10 years before this stuff was a hot topic, and all the
fluid dynamics and electronic-dynamic control theory that he weaves into
the narrative seems to steer clear of those things...


multi-rationally,

dan


Daniel J. Stein        {; < 0>         stein at magma.geol.ucsb.edu
Geological Sciences                http://www.geol.ucsb.edu/~stein
University of California        (805) 893-8130 (voice)
Santa Barbara, CA 93106        (805) 893-2314 (fax)