Baseball's crazy, but so are the fans sometime.
Yesterday I came across an article about one of the Dodger players that I had
to read, because of the title:
Kiké Hernandez and The Case of the Extra Tight Pants
Apparently a fan of Kiké was noticing that he seemed to do better when he was wearing the tightest pants.
So, she writes:
I began to wonder if Kiké’s pants affected his performance in games. [...] ...the more i thought about Kiké’s pants, the more i convinced myself that this research was necessary and important. i worked on multiple research projects in graduate school, but i hadn't actually used my skills in the "real world" yet. this was my chance.
i began to chart Kiké’s pants tightness game by game, matching it with statistics from baseball reference. [...] I spent
two months analyzing statistics, learning how to calculate them, and identifying the best options. i narrowed it down to WPA and OPS and after hours upon hours of calculations, questions to r/Dodgers, and lost sleep, i discovered an online OPS calculator that could have saved me a lot of trouble. I decided to calculate the OPS for each pants tightness tier; this was easily achievable using my detailed excel spreadsheet and the online OPS calculator.
i am proud to present my findings as part of my dissertation [...] and I have summarized my findings... [...] I have attached my formal research paper and excel spreadsheet for your information and enjoyment.
Her findings suggested that he performs best wearing the tightest pants. I looked at her 20 page research paper for the first half of this season and she really did this using statistics, pants tightness groupings and analytics -- it was no joke.
Well, apparently the Dodger broadcaster's found out about this somehow, because when I was watching the game last night they mentioned it! When Kiké got a hit they mentioned that he must have "his tight pants on tonight." Later when he got a second hit they referenced this again talking about the study and that he got "one hit for each pants leg so far tonight."
This is all hysterical!
This study also includes a link to photos showing three subsets of pants tightness. LOL!