By Karen Klinger

For kids who would rather study baseball box scores than arithmetic and college students who like analyzing David Ortiz’s swing better than puzzling over physics problems, Andy Andres is something of a dream come true.

Andres is a faculty member at Boston University who also serves as a coach and instructor at a free MIT-sponsored summer program called the “Science of Baseball" for incoming eighth-grade boys in the Cambridge and Boston public schools.

In addition, he moonlights at Tufts University, where he teaches one of the only known college courses in Sabermetrics—the objective analysis of baseball—involving the approach to the nation’s pastime taken by Bill James, the celebrated statistics man for the Boston Red Sox.

At the recent Cambridge Science Festival, Andres took time to offer baseball fans his insights on topics ranging from why the sacrifice bunt is not a good move to the attraction steroids and bat-corking hold for players, even though they are banned.

Andres, who holds a Ph.D. and lives with his family in Cambridge, represents just the latest of generations of scientists and mathematicians who have studied how Newton’s Laws of motion apply to a five-ounce cowhide sphere and what happens when very skilled people (and some not so skilled) throw and bat it around.

More than in any other sport, a powerful mythology has built up about how a pitched baseball can be made to drop, curve and move in unexpected ways and how a bat can drive it a long or short distance, depending on factors like topspin, backspin, humidity and altitude and the way it rebounds from the stick’s “sweet spot.”

Fifty years ago, Lyman J. Briggs—once the director of the National Bureau of Standards—used wind-tunnel experiments to demonstrate that curve balls are not optical illusions, but really do curve because of air-pressure differentials explained in a law of physics known as “Bernoulli’s principle."

As Andres explained, subsequent research has shown that while curveballs have topspin that pulls them down, fastballs spin backwards, increasing air pressure that slows their gravity-pulled descent, but does not make them—as sometimes claimed—“rise.”

Then there’s the baffling knuckleball, a pitch thrown by relatively few major league players over the years and most notably used today by Red Sox starter Tim Wakefield. While fastballs are preferred by young fireballers, the knuckleball can extend the career of a veteran like Wakefield because it is thrown at a relatively slow speed.

Clutching a baseball with his fingertips, Andres demonstrated that a knuckeball pitcher doesn’t so much throw the ball as “push” it, with a near absence of spin. That lack of rotation (or “gyroscopic” effect) means that air pressure builds up on alternate sides of the ball as it moves, making it oscillate unpredictably, so that the catcher—let alone the batter—doesn’t know where it will end up.

If nothing else, scientific research has shed light on baseball practices that may be based on nothing more than intuition. As Andres noted:

• It is not true that a “walk is as good as a hit.” It depends on whether there is a runner on base and on which base. A walk can move a runner one base, but a single can move him two bases or more, depending on the runner’s speed.
• A sacrifice bunt is not a good strategy, and usually counterproductive—something that “Bill James has been saying for years.” Managers, however, apparently have not been listening.
• Pitching is not the most important factor to winning games. Pitching and hitting are equally important, and luck also plays a major role.
• The biggest boost that players get from taking steroids is not just increased muscle mass and strength but faster bat speed. With a faster bat, a player can “wait on” the ball a fraction of a second longer, giving him an advantage in pitch recognition.
• Using an illegal “corked” bat not only helps a player swing faster by using a lighter stick, it allows him to adjust his swing to strike the ball in the “sweet spot” that transfers to it the greatest amount of energy (making it fly farther).

As he has in the past, Andres this summer will impart those kinds of observations and more to middle school boys who will spend mornings on the MIT campus getting math and science instruction and afternoons playing ball.

“It’s important that we get these boys at this age before they lose interest in the subjects, so we spin it with baseball,” he said.

The program is part of a larger initiative by the MIT Office of Engineering Outreach Programs that offers other enrichment and mentoring opportunities as well to middle and high school students from Boston, Lawrence and Cambridge. Information about them is available at http://web.mit.edu/oeop/ or by e-mailing oeop@mit.edu or calling 617-253-8052.

This year the “Science of Baseball” session runs from July 6 through July 31 and applications are currently being accepted. For more information, go to http://web.mit.edu/msbp/.