What did we know, and when did we know it?
I’ve decided to write down the whole thing. I have several motivations.
- So I can get it all straight myself and refer to it as necessary. There have been some occasions when I didn’t give someone credit I should have and keeping track of our progression will help.
- So I can give those interested a window into the scientific process and the incredible series of random events that make this sort of thing possible.
- So I can acknowledge and thank everyone who helped me along the way.
None of this will be about what SSW is or how it works. That’s in the various posts in this blog and our published articles.
Part 1 will be mostly about how I came to be a baseball fan and a fluid dynamics experimentalist. This will likely be the dullest part and I won’t be hurt if you skip it.
I was born in 1967 in the tiny town of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. In 1969, my family moved to the much larger Grand Rapids, Michigan. Early childhood baseball memories include dad explaining Tigers games. My first firm baseball memory is dad getting up abruptly from the dinner table and announcing he had to go, Bird was pitching. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow him that day.
Around 1980, I attend my first MLB game at Tiger’s Stadium. The Tigers were beaten badly. We took no pictures.
In 1984, I bought a black and white TV at a garage sale for $5, taped a Tiger’s schedule to the side and watched nearly every game. I marked a “W” or “L” on each date. That team led start to finish and won 104 games and the World Series. To this day, I believe Sparky Anderson was the greatest manager ever.
I lost interest in college. In 1992, I quit my job at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh and moved to Atlanta, during the baseball playoffs in which the Braves and Pirates met. It seemed to me that neither city was that into it in spite of a pretty thrilling finish.
During my grad school years in Atlanta, I hosted a Halloween party most years and was always annoyed that someone wanted to watch the Braves during the party. One year I actually took the fuse out of my TV so I could claim it was broken. I was in Atlanta from 1992 to 1999, which should have made for a lot of good baseball watching. I went to one or two games.
I graduated in 1999, moved to Fort Collins, CO, then Los Alamos, NM and then to Logan, Utah in 2001. I gave baseball no thought at all during those years.
On October 20, 2006, Samuel August Minichiello Smith was born. Some time in his early years, I began watching Braves games with him. When he could speak he’d ask who the good guys were and the bad guys. I’d tell him that the bad guys were red (Phillies) and that Ryan Howard was the baddest bad guy. Chase Utley was the second baddest guy. In 2010, I visted Atlanta and picked up a Jason Heyward shirsey for Sam.
In 2012, I signed him up for Little League machine-pitch in Albuquerque. I volunteered to keep score, but got drafted into coaching. He loved it. We returned to Utah and eventually got him on a local team. His first coach suggested he try pitching. I was thrilled.
Sometime around 2015, he was having a pitching lesson and the coach suggested 2S and 4S grips. I began to wonder what the difference in those two pitches was.