Into the Woods

Spurred on by our resident blogging guru at IBM Elias Torres, and inspired by Lee Feigenbaum, I finally registered a domain, and began a Weblog. I must also admit that I was motivated by the fact that Lauren beat me to the punch with a Weblog. This is slightly embarassing as she is working toward her second masters in Classics at BU and I’m working on a Master’s of Computer Science at Harvard while working at IBM, an industry leader in blogging. Nevertheless, here it is.

Those who suffer and abide my weblog regularly can expect to read technology perspectives, skiing stories, fraternity tales, hypothetical baseball scenarios, gripe about the Yankees, IBM gossip, and the like. To this end, I shall conclude my first blog posting *ever* with a baseball situation.

Imagine that Joe Torre has George S. pay 50 million a year for a new player who has a special ability. He can hit singles every time to the plate, but nothing more, nothing less. A few questions arise. First, would this team always win? Mathematically speaking they probably would. A good team batting average such as the Yankees or Red Sox is about .280-.290. Having a player with 1.000 average can raise team average nearly .100. That said, it isn’t obvious how to use such a player. Is he a DH or fielder who always gets a hit his time up? Or, do you wait until that crucial moment when you need a hit, and pinch hit him the first time you have runners in scoring position as Lee sugests?

It remains to be seen whether I will be inspired to write these sorts of questions in the off season, but perhaps there are some good basketball or hockey situations as well.