 Aloha and welcome to season one episode nine. That's right, nine episodes of Figments, The Power of Imagination. Today's gonna be a fun one, I guarantee it, because we're gonna talk about imagining better baseball with a great friend of mine whom I'll introduce in a bit and how he changed the game, a game that we both love and hopefully we got some baseball fans out there. But frankly, before we go into this episode, I do have the issue of viewer advisory. This episode may contain explicit discussions of math. We may mention numbers, variables and equations in a way that some might find upsetting. So like me, for example, the political science major. So let's welcome with that warning and viewer discretion advised, my great friend, Colonel Leos Air Force retired Ross Roley. Aloha Ross. Aloha Fig, it's great to see you again. Thank you for this opportunity. And Ross, I see each other regularly on the golf courses. The viewers know I'm in a slump and he's got a deck being built to be here that I'm funding a major portion of that, it seems like right now, but we see each other a lot and we know each other. And of course, Kim, his wife, truly the definition of a better half was on an earlier show on imagining recovery. So you see Ross and I on the golf course where we spend most of our time together, but coincidentally, we're in baseball kind of gear because we both love the game. Ross is a Cardinals fan, show him your shirt, Ross. I don't know if they can see it, but there it is. Very nice, yep. And I'm a Brewer's fan, got my small M right there. I got to get a new logo shirt now that they've changed logos. But we love the game and we'll talk about how Ross is interested in, in fact, life of math and numbers affected Major League Baseball. So Ross, I've got to ask you first the question that probably gets asked of any person who chooses to be a mathematician. What is wrong with you? I would like to say what is right with me because math opens up a whole world of possibilities. You can't imagine if you're good at math, how many other things you can be good at. I'm doing cybersecurity of industrial control system work right now, and it's not above my intellectual capacity because I understand the math behind it all. My guess in a negative way that it says a lot about me too, but I'm okay with that. You seem like a normal child from the picture I've got here, you might've been dreaming about math at the time, maybe baseball, maybe both. I know what I was thinking about for most of my youth and we won't go there, but did this interest in and love for math happen early? Did you know it was something you just felt in school or? Not really, I mean, I learned math through baseball and we'll talk about that later, but when I got to the Air Force and I got all A's, you probably didn't have to do that at the University of Wisconsin. So there was no differentiation between my grades in high school, but when I had high SATs in math, my verbal SATs were low, but when I got to the Air Force Academy, I initially declared a chemistry major and I was really struggling with chemistry. I thought I could use it to blow things up and make better chemicals and all that, but it wasn't interesting to me and I was getting C's there and A's in math and that's when I decided I gotta switch this. So I flipped over to become a math major. Yeah, well, I did applied physics. You probably don't know that. I applied, you know, 500, 2000 pounds of high explosives to various targets and did in fact, blow them up, but I could never have built those bombs. So here we are, Ross as a young cadet and then later, your retirement from the Air Force in 2008 with the lovely Kim. And that was also your life in the Air Force, right? And you didn't, I mean, we don't use the math officer. Who's the math officer in this fight? But you used math and then you actually taught it at the Air Force Academy. And I know there were people in your classes at the Academy like me who struggle with math, frankly. And, you know, I've gotten to the point where I use it. I am kind of a spreadsheet geek like you, but how did you reach people like me as a math professor at the Air Force Academy? That's a great question. I tried to use sports because that's what I was interested. We had this one guy that I was giving tutoring to, his name was Ray Dudley. He was an all-star basketball player, WAC conference of the year, but he just wasn't understanding math. And I sat him down, I told him, here's the expected value of your two-point shots based on this field goal percentage. And here's your expected value of your three-point shooting based on the three-point shooting percentage. And this is why you should shoot more three-pointers. And he got it. He's like, oh, that's math. I love math now. And he didn't get an A in the course, but I could show him how math could help his passion. I love that because it's mostly a matter of reaching people and getting them to be able to relate to the topic. And I look it back at my academic struggles that were real until I came in the Air Force and learned how to learn is because it was going right by me. I was, it never connected with my head. And we do math every weekend. I'm gonna show a picture of our foreson from Saturday, you and Ben, me and Alejo. Great day on the course. You took my money. Someday I'm gonna, there will be a market correction. But we do play in a group called the gaggle, mostly Air Force military and retired guys. And it's one of the highlights of my life. And I think yours too. It is absolutely. And that day you were talking about Saturday with your stepson and my son and you and me, that's to me a great opportunity to have a father or son thing. If I look distracted, it's because I'm preoccupied with how much money I won on Saturday. Oh, shit, you did. And by the way, though on that original picture that I showed of us was taken on the whole number two where I have a recent hole in one and you don't have a recent hole in one on that hole you do on number six. But the gaggle, this is a great group of feisty old and young people. And we bet big money a dollar at a time. I mean, there's a lot at stake. And you're the director of golf. You're in charge of the group. And I appreciate you doing that. The reason I bring that up is because math plays a role in that because we have to settle these very small but important, that's so important that there's usually an argument about the calculation, right? Every week. Well, pretty much every week. And I had the opportunity to use my math skills in golf because of COVID. They said, don't exchange money during COVID. So I came up with a system using my iPad and Excel spreadsheet and you named it gaggle bitcoins which I thought was brilliant. And so I kept track of everybody's wins and losses and their scores and everything on this Excel spreadsheet and updated it all the time. But what I found out two weeks ago when we stopped using the Bitcoin, we decided, oh, we can do cash again. People forgot how to exchange cash. Yeah, they did. This is a very simple ritual with salt shakers holding down bills on the table for various small wagers folks, totally legal. But we lost that core competency. And that's kind of funny. The gaggle bitcoins sadly highlighted your new work in cybersecurity because if you weren't doing that, I might have succeeded in my hacking attempts to raise my debts in the gaggle bitcoins. And does math help you at golf? Now I've seen your good days and your bad days but are you thinking about probabilities as you choose a strategy or a shot when you step up to the ball? Yes, and one of our favorite games is Wolf where you have to pick a partner. Math goes into that calculation. That's why I hate that game. Because there's various people that get strokes and don't get strokes. So who do you pick for a partner? Do you pick a guy who had a bad tee shop and he's getting a stroke? And so, yeah, I constantly try and optimize that problem. Yeah, cool. Well, we're gonna talk about baseball because that's really why we're here in just a second. But first I'd like to tell you what's coming up in a week, a week from today. I'm going to start Fignance on Reality. That's gonna be a commentary show, apolitical, not apolitical. One word, apolitical commentary because I don't do politics in public just like I shouldn't do math in public. For reasons I'll probably talk about during that show. I'll talk about the issues of the day. I might talk about tensions in Taiwan or any of the other issues going on. The mask, CDC mandate as the state is looking at it. But again, from an apolitical perspective, I'll probably tell some stories. I have great stories, right, Ross? You do. Thank you. I did not pay him for that. And probably get some guests on future episodes. So every other week, Fignance on Reality will appear at 10 a.m. Hawaii Standard Time on Think Tech Hawaii. And then Fignance of the Power of Imagination, this kind of episode will appear at 2 p.m. on the alternate Mondays. And they'll also be on my YouTube playlist. And I'll try to make sure that we put both types of episodes on the playlist so as to avoid confusion. So let's get back to Ross Rowley, the man who changed baseball or at least played a part in it. Ross, you and I were never baseball stars but we both love the game. What do you love about the game without mentioning math? Oh, shoot. I got to mention math because what I love about the game is it's not a small sample size. In football, you play 16 games and in basketball, you play 80, but there's 162 games. And so over an entire season, you can get a pretty good statistical reliability on what a player's performance is. Yeah, I find myself about every day there's a game during the regular season saying, why are you so upset or happy about 1-1-60-second of the season? And we both have heroes, right? And from the game that we've talked about, mine, oh, first of all, here's a great picture of you and Ben at a baseball game. I almost forgot to show that. And then me with a friend of mine, Bob Euker, just a bit outside. There's no experience like going to ball game because it lasts as Alejandro would say an eternity. You're there for a while, right? And I enjoy that. I miss going to see the games, but let's move on to your heroes. You know from my last week's episode, Ross, that Hank Aaron is my hero. He's still my favorite baseball player. There are many others that I think of. Sadly, one of them is from your team. I love and hate watching Yadier Molina play because he's so intense. I mean, every minute, every second of every game, but he usually does things that don't help the brewers. So you gave me a choice between Bob Gibson and Lou Brock, right, as your heroes. What do you like about Lou Brock? Because I'm going to talk about Bob Gibson in a minute. Okay, yeah, Lou Brock was, well, I grew up in the 60s and where I grew up in Seattle, there was no baseball team. But every summer we went to the family farm. My mom grew up on a farm in Illinois outside of St. Louis and we went to ball games there and I just listened to the radio and watched as many games on TV as I could. And my daughter, when Lou Brock passed away, Renee gave me this Lou Brock vintage jersey, which I thought was good. And I've got a Lou Brock baseball, but I want to say something about Henry Aaron, awesome ball player, but did you know that for many years, decades even, he and Karima Abdul-Jabbar shared a former Milwaukee buck named Abdul-Jabbar shared an interesting story in fact, they were both first in the alphabet of baseball reference and basketball reference or the basketball encyclopedia, whatever it was. And Abdul-Jabbar was the scoring leader and Henry Aaron was the home run leader while they were both number one alphabet. Yeah, and that was when Karima Abdul-Jabbar was still Lou Elcindor or Abdul-Jabbar as Lou Elcindor. Well, he retired as the king of scoring as Abdul-Jabbar but when he was a buck, he was Lou Elcindor along. I think Oscar Robertson and Bobby Dandridge were on those teams and they won a championship, did they not? They did, and man, what great sports. I've got chicken skin because I love sports, but Bob Gibson was an imposing picture and I happened to find the other day and I shared it with you by text, a quote that I'm going to read. I don't usually read on big months. This is such a great quote. This is Hank Aaron talking about Bob Gibson. He says, actually it's as told by Dusty Baker. Another great player, great guy, I've met him once, but Hank Aaron told me, don't dig in against Bob Gibson. He'll knock you down. He'll knock down his own grandmother if she dared to challenge him. Don't stare at him, don't smile at him, don't talk to him, he doesn't like it. If you happen to hit a home run, don't run too slow, don't run too fast. If you happen to want to celebrate, get in the tunnel first. And if he hits you, do not charge the mound because he's a gold glove boxer. And Dusty says, I'm like, damn, what about my 17 game hitting streak? That's the night it ended. That's baseball, man. That's the inner drama of baseball. Well, and so you're asking before, what do I like about it? Those individual pitcher, batter, matchups and how important each strike is in each at bat. One other thing about Henry Aaron. I've got a cousin who is a huge Henry Aaron fan. And when Henry Aaron was trying to break Babe Ruth's record, he went on the road and was in the outfield in Cincinnati for the opening. He was gonna be there. So he was in Cincinnati and then he went to Atlanta and he actually held up a bed sheet with a big target on it in the outfield and left field. If you ever see the famous home run, the 715, look for that bed sheet. But the ironic thing is that I had a poster of the Henry Aaron home run in my boyhood home with that bed sheet. I didn't know until years later that he was there and he was holding that target. Well, the drama, that kind of drama that the record setting home run, the drama facing Bob Gibson. No, thank you. That's the beauty of baseball in the intricacy that gives you your sample size. Both in one game and in one season or a seven game series is what I love about it. And part of my affection for the sport comes from a guy named Dwayne Decker who I don't know if you may be too much younger than me. He wrote baseball books for boys, and he was a maternal step grand father. Something like that. It was a complex relationship. My mom's mom was married a few times. And he wrote these beautiful stories off to bring one for you to just take a look at Russ about this detail and this intricacy. And you fell in love with that and used it to learn math and probability. How? This goes back to them. What's wrong with you? Well, when I was a kid growing up, I was a baseball fan. And so you look at statistics, you look at the batting average, you look at earned run average. Those were the main ones when I was growing up. And I fell in love with the numbers. And even to the point where I would clip out the box score every day and I'd keep a running total before spreadsheets of here's all the Cardinals performances up to date. And if I missed a box score, I'd go to the library to pull up the sporting news from that day so I could fill in the blanks. And so that's what's wrong with me. I'm just obsessed with baseball. So that taught me the statistics side of math, but there's a probability which was also taught to me by baseball. And my brother introduced me to a game called Stratomatic. And it's a dice game back in the day. Now it's on computers where you've got a picture card. And I'm gonna show these to the screen. Hopefully they can- Let's see if our wizard Melissa can do much with that. But- I have Madison Bump Gardner and Buster Posey cards here. And there's columns one, two, three, and four, five, six. You roll one dice to see if you look at the picture card or the hitter card. And then you roll the two other dice to see where it falls. And those two dice form 36 different outcomes. They're multiplied by 20 different possibilities on each dice roll. So that's 720 per column. And then add up to six columns and you end up with over 4,000, 4,320 different probabilities of this is actual information from the previous year. So we used to play that game all the time. And lo and behold, that's how I learned probabilities is through those 36 outcomes times 20 times six. And I still use that today. I still play Stratomatic. The outcomes are based on, the outcomes are in fact subjective. The roll of dice determines the outcome, but it's influenced by the objective foundation of their past performance. Exactly. And you can see on the card, you know, Buster Posey's got more singles and home runs than other guys. Madison Bump Gardner has more strikeouts. This is from 2014 when I stopped using the cards and just did it all online. It's not a, it's not a direct corollary, but as I have done and taught leadership and think about how to make decisions as a leader, I always try to say get an objective basis for your subjective decision. But at some point you have to make, you have to be willing to make that leap to what you don't know. And if you're waiting for the numbers to give you the answer, they're not going to give you the answer. You have to, I guess, in this sense, sort of divine or guess at the probability. You have to in fact roll the dice. Yes, the dice are the dice and they don't have any memory. They don't know what these are, but you know, you can have some crazy outcomes. And it reminds me of General Colin Powell's quote when someone asked him about leadership and decision-making, he said, you should make a decision with 80% of the information because it's wasted effort above that and decision-making has to be in a timely manner. And that sounds exactly what you tell people as well. I couldn't agree more. And so you got so into this that you started a baseball blog and wrote about the 1980 World Series. And I'm going to show the calculations. First of all, so you and I have a different view of that. Okay, we got the calculations up there now. I was at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, attending the Army Command and General Staff College, so as an Air Force guy. So I became a Kansas City Royals fan and you're a St. Louis fan. This was the I-70 series, hotly contested. And there was a specific call in the eighth inning that dramatically affected the game. So tell us about your math here on the screen. All right, so it was actually ninth inning of game six in the World Series. The Cardinals had the lead, the lead-off batter hit a grounder to a first base. He tossed it to the pitcher. The umpire ruled the batter, who was George Orta, ruled him safe at first when all the replays showed that he was out. So instant replay wasn't in vogue then. But years later, once I realized, hey, I could figure out the probability. What is the chances that that determined the outcome of the World Series? So this blog article I wrote for a site called Baseball Head in 2006. Yes, also before Major League Baseball Head instant replay. I painted the picture, the scenario of how a blown call could affect the entire outcome of the World Series. Is it a home run? And the home team wins and walk-off fashion? Or is it out at home? And the visiting team wins the World Series and everybody's disappointed. So people, go ahead. No, you go ahead. I'll go ahead because I'm gonna ask you a question. I'm the host, right? I told you that beforehand. So if I'm at home, I'm opening another beer and celebrating or I'm yelling at the TV saying, Deccinger, you cost us the game, but you have a more reasonable answer. You changed the likely outcome and the bottom line answer was, go ahead. So from a starting point, if you look at all those equations, the starting point is what's the difference in run probability for a runner at first base and down by one run and zero outs versus nobody on down by a run and one out. And then you start peeling back in the onion and okay, what's the probability that the visiting team or the home team wins that game? And then you got to project what's probability they visiting team wins game seven after having won game six. And it turns out through all those calculations that the blown call by Don Deccinger, 80% affected the outcome of the entire World Series, not just that game, but the entire World Series, 80%. And so it's not just me or the rest of all of Missouri shouting at their TV, half of Missouri, the Eastern half, it tells in a rational way how much this changed the potential outcome. It doesn't say the Royals couldn't have won, it says odds are they wouldn't have won the game or the World Series. So two years later, Major League Baseball adopts in a limited manner, instant replay. But just for certain calls, right? Do you remember what those calls were that they wrote? Yeah, I think at first they were homerun calls and fairfowl and that was it. The base, you know, first base and second base up, that came a couple of years after that. So they weren't listening to you. Come on, man, pay attention, this guy's a math major. Well, I was told by the owner of the Baseball Analysts blog site that someone from Major League Baseball read that article. So I tell people, you know, I'm responsible for that, but I'm saying too. And we got about three minutes left. I want to talk a little bit about baseball. Obviously it's much more utilized now. They've got the Starship Enterprise to look at when it comes to their replays and they examine almost everything. I get frustrated with what they don't examine sometimes. But, and they still miss calls sometimes, but there are antibodies out there that hate instant replay. And to me, it's you try to get it right and if you can get it right, you do. What do you think? Oh, I agree. And I think I'm hoping for the day when there's robo-umps that call balls and strikes. That's the next thing I want to see. Yeah, we've talked about that on the golf course. I'm kind of bipolar on that one day. I like it when the calls go against my Milwaukee Brewers and the next day when we get the benefit of a generous strike zone. I think it's a bad idea. The only thing and it's the complexity of baseball again, the only thing that I would miss is the variability of hitters adjusting to strike zones. So if you could skew the robot a little bit and sort of randomize what edges you get or you don't get before that. It's the, I won't name any umpire's names, but I'm thinking of a couple that are just sort of random. Okay, that's a ball. No, it's a strike. Next time it's a ball. I wouldn't miss that. What's the worst blown call in the history of baseball that you're aware of? Well, it has to be the Don Dinkinger call. I mean, analytically, 80% is pretty high for affecting the entire World Series. So there was one, shoot, I was watching a telecast the other day and there was a ball like a foot above the zone that the umpire called a strike and the announcers and the dugout were like, what just happened? Did he see the same thing that we saw? And on one of my favorite websites, it's called Fan Graphs. There was an Arthur, he's moved on to a baseball team, but he would do like a monthly article on the worst blown, the worst strikes and the worst balls analytically for that month. The call that I think of is the one that cost a perfect game and I'll think of the pitcher's name later, Detroit. Armando Gallaraga. Yeah, and that was just sad, the umpire knew. He said, hey Ross, we're already out of time. We're gonna have to talk about this Wednesday on the golf course. Okay, great and I just wanna say that I'm not disappointed that you, I was your second choice behind Bob Buker. I'm okay with that. Yeah, I hope that. I've been asked Bob Buker at some point because that would be hilarious. We need about three hours. He's even funnier in person. Okay, thank you, Ross. I'll see you Wednesday coming up. As I said, there'll be figments on reality next week and we've got some great episodes coming up and figments, the power of imagination, including, honey, I bought a race car. Enough for a great story. A friend of mine, Slick and Geary who flew and flew and flew. That's what he dreamt of and he's done it over 25,000 hours. So I'll see you next week, figments on reality and thanks again for watching and thanks to Think Tech for hosting our show. Aloha.