For the first time in nineteen years, my beloved Detroit Tigers are going to the playoffs. Since I’m writing this in late September, I have no idea how they will do once they get there, but just making it to the playoffs is a huge achievement for a team that only a few years ago lost 119 games.
One reason the Tigers have had such an exceptionally good season is because of the arm of their rookie fire-balling relief pitcher Joel Zumaya. Joel routinely throws fastballs in the 100 miles per hour range. At least once he hit 103—for that he was featured on a Comcast high speed Internet commercial. When he comes in to pitch, and he’s got his stuff, batters go down on strikes.
I ordinarily watch the Tigers on the local Fox Sports affiliate, which has a pair of announcers who follow the team. But now and then a game is televised nationally, and recently one was shown on ESPN 2. On that announcing team was Joe Morgan, the hall of fame second baseman from the World Champion Cincinnati “Big Red Machine” Reds of the 1970s. Not only was he great at what he did then, but he’s great at what he does now, having won Emmy awards for his broadcasting skills. However, while I was watching him, he ran afoul of me.
You see, Zumaya came into the game, and, as usual, the radar gun was showing him throwing pitches of 100, 101, even 102 miles per hour. But Joe Morgan didn’t think the pitches were that fast. And he claimed he could tell this from the broadcasting booth. He pointed out that home teams sometimes alter their radar guns to make them read faster, neglecting to note that Zumaya throws his fastballs in opposing team stadiums as well, and their radar guns also show him pitching at 100+ mph. Morgan even claimed he could tell the difference between a 100 and a 101 mph pitch.
So there I am, watching TV, wanting to shout at the screen: “How can you tell that, Joe? When was it you compared a 100 mile per hour pitch with a 101 mile per hour pitch? How did you know the speed of either one of them? Did someone tell you? How did he know? Was a radar gun present, or some other way to make the measurement? Did you do this often enough so you could acquire the skill to reliably discriminate the faster pitch from the slower? And from a broadcasting booth? Hmmm?”
I don’t suppose there’s anything to be gained by pursuing the issue with Joe Morgan. If he’s willing to dispute what the radar gun says, and do it on TV before a national audience, he isn’t going to listen to me. He expected his listeners to believe him when he said he could distinguish a real 101 mph pitch from a slightly slower one. After all, why shouldn’t we believe him? He’s an expert, right? He’s in the Hall of Fame. What more do you want?
Well, this is the Alternate View, and I want a lot more. I think his claim is easy to undercut. The Achilles Heel of any suspect claim is usually a faulty comparison, so let’s find it.
It seems reasonable to assume that sometime in the past Joe Morgan faced pitchers who were said to have a 100 mph or better pitch. And during his broadcast career, he’s seen other pitchers with 100+ mph fastballs, too. I doubt Joe just manufactured his assertion out of thin air, so he must be comparing what he remembers those pitchers throwing with what he sees from the booth, and making a judgment. Specifically, he has an image in his mind of what a true 101 mph pitch looks like, and judging that what Zumaya was throwing was slower than that.
My unshouted questions go to the heart of the matter—how does Joe Morgan know that what he sees in his head is accurate?
Suppose you wanted to develop the ability that Joe Morgan claims he has. What should you do?
One thing you could do is go to a baseball diamond and have a pitching machine set to throw 100 mph pitches at you. Then you could set it to thrown 101 mph pitches. You should have a radar gun around to verify that the pitches are in fact at those speeds. Make sure you have the radar gun properly calibrated beforehand, and double-check the calibration afterwards.
Once you’ve gotten some experience with the 100 and 101 mph pitches, you could have someone randomly change the speed of the pitching machine to either value, and then, once you see the pitch, you could try to accurately predict what the setting was. Do this often enough, and perhaps you could develop the ability to accurately distinguish a 100 mph pitch from a 101 mph pitch.
Suppose you get to the point where you can accurately tell the difference between the two pitches 90 to 95 percent of the time. What then? Well, if you want to be as good as Joe Morgan, you should go up to the broadcasting booth and see if you can still get the right answer 90 percent of the time. If not, keep practicing until you do.
Now are you ready? No. Not all broadcasting booths are created equal. You really need to situate yourself at all kinds of different positions with respect to the pitching machine, enough so that you develop the ability to distinguish between the two pitches regardless of where the broadcast booth is in a stadium.
Do any of you think Joe Morgan ever did anything remotely like this? No? Me either. This doesn’t prove he can’t do what he says, but there is ample reason to doubt that he can.
The reasoning I used to undercut Joe Morgan’s claim can (and probably should) also be used when ascertaining the likely validity of all sorts of other suspect claims involving comparisons, including scientific ones, even if you’re not an expert. Particularly susceptible are those claims of the “it’s never been this bad before” variety.
Here’s a for instance. Last year the US went through a bad hurricane season. Claims were made that 2006 would bring another terrible hurricane season. In the “Instant Expert” section of Popular Science (July, 2006) on pages 66 and 67 (attributed to Elizabeth Svoboda), readers were told, “Why 2006 Will Be So Stormy.” Some experts claim that global warming is to blame. More precisely, claims are made that hurricanes are worse now, on average, both in number and intensity, than they ever were before.
So far, with October looming, this hurricane season has been a real bust. What went wrong?
The problem doesn’t lie with Mother Nature—she knows what she’s doing. We all know weather predictions can be terribly wrong even when made only a day before, let alone a year. Most experts on hurricanes have long predicted that the US would enter a bad stretch of increased hurricane activity during the present decade, based on records of previous cyclic hurricane behavior, without reference to global warming at all. So to assert that 2006 would match 2005 wasn’t unreasonable. It just so happened that a severe year was followed by a mild one this time.
But are hurricanes actually getting worse, on average, “than ever before?” Can we even tell?
On page 67 of the aforementioned Popular Science piece, it says: “And storms are getting stronger.” The reader is then referred to a bar chart inset on page 66 showing the percentage of category 4 and 5 hurricanes in five-year wide increments since 1970. In the 1970-74 slot about 15 or 16 percent of hurricanes were in category 4 or 5. The bars covering 1990 through 2004 all show over 30 percent.
Let’s consider this bar chart. For the chart to prove the “worse” hypothesis, we need to know how many hurricanes were averaged in the past, and how strong they were. Since we’re working with averages, we need to be able to use data that goes back pretty far into the past. There’s nothing special about 1970, so why does the chart begin there? “Ever before” is a long time.
Since hurricane patterns are cyclic, and since the present period was expected to be hurricane prone based on that cyclic behavior, it is no surprise that hurricane intensity was lower in the previous few decades. It also follows that hurricane activity must have been greater prior to 1970. However, if hurricanes really are getting worse, then the average numbers and intensity of hurricanes during the pre-1970 high parts of the cycle must not have been quite as many nor quite as intense.
These days, what with our satellites looking at the Earth every second, we know where every hurricane is at any given moment, and even where a hurricane might develop. We can send airplanes in to take measurements, and take those measurements with very accurate instrumentation indeed. We have gotten much better at this since the ’70s and ’80s. Prior to those decades, we were in the Stone Age of hurricane study.
What did we rely on before we had satellites? Reports from aircraft and ships. But how accurate were those reports compared with what we have today? How reliable was the instrumentation? How well can readings taken then be calibrated with readings taken now? If, in reality, there were twenty hurricanes in a given year, were twenty hurricanes reported? Or did some occur in places where they were missed? Today we can watch a tropical storm turn into a hurricane for a day and then decay back into a tropical storm, essentially in real time. How would that same storm have been classified if it had never been observed as a hurricane? If it didn’t hit an island or no ship encountered it, we’d have no idea at all that part of its life was spent as a hurricane, would we?
It may indeed be the case that hurricane seasons are getting worse due to global warming, but the hurricane chart can’t tell us that. It is simply not valid to compare the numbers and strengths of hurricanes we know about today, measured and assessed by modern means, with numbers arrived at decades ago. The only thing we can be fairly certain about is that the methodology available in the past would have tended to underestimate the actual number of hurricanes in a given year.
The hypothesis that hurricanes are getting worse is worthy of investigation. To do it right, one could start with data obtained from the 1980s or ’90s, and then keep taking data for the next hundred or hundred and fifty years. Then you’d know that no hurricanes had been missed in any given year, and that you’d also accurately classified their respective intensities. Even if the criteria for classification should change during the next century, you’d probably still be able to reclassify the storms of today with those of tomorrow because we’re able to collect and store so much data these days. Then you could put together a bar chart that even I would believe.
But accept that hurricanes are “worse than ever” on the basis of the chart Ms. Svoboda provided? Shoot, she might just as well have said, “Because Joe Morgan says so.”
