Professor Fascinated By Link Between Baseball, Mathematics

If your favorite baseball team hammers out 12 hits in a single game, how many runs are they likely to score?

Ken Ross is glad you asked. At a blackboard in Fenton Hall with a Boston Red Sox cap on his head, Ross scribbles out a graph, talks about regression lines and correlation coefficients, and writes out an equation: y equals .828x - 2.87.

The answer is seven runs or, more precisely, 7.066 runs, at least based on the major league games that were played on a recent Wednesday.

The 17 students in Ross’ “Mathematics of Baseball” freshman seminar class dutifully write down the equation.

Not because it’s going to be on a test, but because it’s about baseball and true aficionados can never know too much about the statistical intricacies of the game they love.

Joe DiMaggio may have once hit safely in 56 consecutive games, but Ross has a record almost nearly as impressive: He’s taught mathematics at the UO for 35 consecutive years.

He’s hanging up the academic cleats after this term, but not before teaching this final course on the one game you’d expect a mathematician to love: baseball.

“It’s clearly the most statistical,” he said, comparing it to football or basketball. “It’s a deliberate, somewhat more intellectual game than the others.”

Ross decided to teach the class in part because he wanted to explore the notion of hitting streaks as a phenomenon that, statistically speaking, may not exist.

“If you flip a coin 1,000 times, sometimes you’ll get heads six or eight times in a row,” he said. “But when a ballplayer (gets that many hits) in a row, it’s, `Wow, he’s really on a hot streak.’ It may feel like a hot streak, but it isn’t necessarily so.”

Ross delights in such counterintuitive analysis.

One of two textbooks he’s assigned his students to read, after all, argues that the greatest hitter in the history of the game is the San Diego Padres’ Tony Gwynn, an assertion that can keep baseball fans arguing for years.

A diminutive man, Ross said he was too small and inept to play baseball as a child. But he learned to love it at an early age, growing up in Utah, 1-1/2 blocks from the Salt Lake City Bees’ minor league ballclub’s stadium.

His businessman dad always had free tickets - a perk for sponsoring one of the advertising billboards along the outfield wall.

Ross said he remembers watching a future major leaguer, Gus “Tremendous” Triandos, play at Salt Lake.

Triandos, he said, holds the record for stolen-base percentage among major-league players who played more than 1,000 games.

The lumbering Triandos was 1 for 1, successfully stealing against a catcher who was so amazed at the attempt that he didn’t even try to throw Triandos out.

A lefty, Ross said he never owned a left-handed glove until his 30s, when his daughters were old enough to want to play the game themselves.

Even professors are entitled to moments of baseball glory, and Ross tasted his when he took his new mitt to a mathematics department softball game in the 1970s. “I still remember the first fly ball that came to me in left field,” he said. “I fell flat on my back, but I caught it.”