Sam Fuld: His love of metrics likely stems from education and family.

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Sam Fuld is known as being a proponent of metrics.  He graduated with an economics degree from Stanford University, no small accomplishment.  Clearly he is into the numbers.

 

Back in 2012, there was a story about Fuld and some of the discussions he'd have in the Rays clubhouse concerning metrics. (link below).

 

Fuld has had a few conversations about those numbers in the Rays clubhouse with teammates like reliever Burke Badenhop, another former economics major at Bowling Green State University.

 

"It's just kind of the evolution of baseball. If you can do something and do it better, I think you want to be on that side of the trend," Badenhop said. "You can say batting averages and ERAs and stuff like that, but you know some guys' true value to the team isn't dictated by them, and there might be other metrics that quantify that better."

 

'Fuld, has always had a passion for the game's numbers. He looked at newspaper box scores as a kid, carried around a Baseball Encyclopedia as a 6-year-old and eventually held an internship with STATS, Inc. That led him to sabermetrics, where his greatest interest currently involves quantifying defensive value through advanced metrics like UZR.'

 

Where did that interest come from?

 

Well, his dad is Kenneth Fuld, is/was the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Psychology at the University of New Hampshire.  Ken Fuld has always been a baseball enthusiast and has studied many things about baseball to include busting some baseball myths.  If you click on the link below, you will be able to read some fascinating info Ken Fuld has studied and concluded.  

 

Some of the nuggets (but really, the whole thing is fascinating)

 

'"In the last few feet before the plate, the ball reaches an angular velocity that exceeds the ability of the eye to track the ball," Fuld told LiveScience. "The best hitters can track the ball to within 5 or 6 feet of the plate."'

 

'Sometimes players will abandon eye contact mid-way through the pitch and move their line of sight to where they anticipate the ball will cross the plate. Batters often "take" the first couple pitches of an "at bat" in this manner to try and calibrate the movement and speed of a pitcher's offerings.'  (That might explain why some hitters take the first pitch or two consistently)

 

'When a hitter swings under the ball and misses, baseball announcers sometimes say the pitcher got him with a "rising fastball." But technically, this pitch cannot exist if thrown overhand--it's impossible for a pitch thrown downward to buck gravity and achieve upward lift.'

 

http://www.livescience.com/4093-busting-baseball-myths-scientist-throws-big-curveballs.html

 

http://tampabay.rays.mlb.com/news/print.jsp?ymd=20120623&content_id=33825226&vkey=news_tb&c_id=tb

 

Needless to say that Sam and his dad have a passion for understanding the game as much as possible.