{"id":588283,"date":"2010-05-27T08:01:04","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T12:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=46967"},"modified":"2010-05-27T08:01:04","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T12:01:04","slug":"it%e2%80%99s-all-about-the-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/588283","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s all about the numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alexander Ahmed was 5 years old when he started playing a board game called Strat-O-Matic Baseball.<\/a> Armed with stats cards from seasons going back to 1911, players roll dice to pitch, swing, and make defensive plays. \u201cIt simulates real-life baseball pretty well,\u201d said the senior from suburban Springfield, Mass.<\/p>\n

For Ahmed, Strat-O-Matic combined two early passions: sports play and statistics. Growing up, he studied box scores, and kept stats on every game he played. In high school, Ahmed was a three-sport varsity athlete who excelled in science and math too. At Harvard, there was ample opportunity to put the two worlds together.<\/p>\n

On the sports side, Ahmed, an applied mathematics concentrator at Winthrop House, played junior varsity baseball for his first two years. He then masterminded the transformation of the struggling team from junior varsity status to the Harvard Baseball Club, where his batting average (.490) was second on the team this year.<\/p>\n

Then there are all those intramural sports. \u201cI try to do as many as I can,\u201d said Ahmed. \u201cIt\u2019s what I do for exercise.\u201d Those included soccer, flag football, volleyball, ultimate Frisbee, basketball, softball, crew, swimming, and ice hockey. Of the last, he said, \u201cI learned to skate last year so I could play.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ahmed also has explored the mathematical and scientific dimensions that sport offers. His senior thesis \u2014 63 pages of narrative, equations, and appendices \u2014 uses a statistical modeling tool called the Markov Chain to estimate \u201crun expectancy\u201d in baseball.<\/p>\n

He also belongs to the 20-member Harvard Sports Analysis Collective<\/a>, where weekly meetings draw in concentrators from fields such as math, statistics, economics, and psychology. \u201cWe try to ask interesting questions that any sports fan would ask,\u201d said Ahmed, \u201cthen try to answer them with the tools that we have from our studies.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his sophomore year, he was one of seven students in the club who wrote a paper for the online Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports<\/a> on \u201cpark factors,\u201d the ways to adjust statistics based on the qualities of baseball venues. One example is the \u201cGreen Monster,\u201d the famously high wall in Fenway Park\u2019s left field. Ahmed also did a second-year independent study project for the Arizona Diamondbacks on pitching rotations.<\/p>\n

Then there are the courses that Ahmed has taken that cross science with sports, such as this semester\u2019s comparative biomechanics. (He wrote his final paper on the biomechanics of throwing.) \u201cThey\u2019re difficult classes,\u201d said Ahmed, but they left him with a solid life skill in problem solving.<\/p>\n

In April, he was turned down for stats jobs with the Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians. But teaching math is an option too, something Ahmed tried out last year in a summer school program for rising eighth-graders who were struggling in math and science.<\/p>\n

Ahmed and undergraduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were paid to bring baseball into lessons in the mornings and coach baseball in the afternoons. One class on projectile motion used hardball throws to calculate velocity. Another, on probability, used major league statistics.<\/p>\n

On field trips, the youngsters visited work settings that combined sport and science, including bat-testing engineers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell\u2019s Baseball Research Center<\/a>. \u201cIt was cool for the kids to see that,\u201d said Ahmed. \u201cIt showed that if you want to go into engineering, you can partner it with something that you love, like baseball.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there is the Harvard University Band<\/a>, a social constant for four years. It taught him leadership skills (he managed the band last year), let him play trombone (an instrument he took up in fifth grade), and allowed for a lot of sports viewing (football, hockey, basketball, and more).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe older alums love the band the most,\u201d said Ahmed. \u201cThey sing along with the fight songs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alexander Ahmed was 5 years old when he started playing a board game called Strat-O-Matic Baseball. Armed with stats cards from seasons going back to 1911, players roll dice to pitch, swing, and make defensive plays. \u201cIt simulates real-life baseball pretty well,\u201d said the senior from suburban Springfield, Mass. For Ahmed, Strat-O-Matic combined two early […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-588283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=588283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}