GATHERED ON THE pitcher’s mound during class, Pomona College students feed balls into a pitching machine, then quickly glance down at an iPad.

On the ground between them and home plate is a boxlike device called a Rapsodo, a $4,000 radar-based system that provides data not only on pitch velocity, but also spin rate, spin axis, horizontal and vertical break, 3D trajectory and a strike zone analysis.

The Rapsodo device provides pitching data that includes velocity, spin rate and vertical and horizontal break.

Welcome to PE 086: Baseball Analytics, a new course taught by Frank Pericolosi, a professor of physical education and coach of the Pomona-Pitzer baseball team.

The class formalizes what has emerged as a notable career path for Pomona alumni: More than a dozen graduates or current students have put backgrounds in mathematics and computer science to work for Major League Baseball teams analyzing the game-changing explosion of data in baseball.

They’re following a trail blazed by Guy Stevens ’13, a former Sagehens pitcher and math major who has risen to senior director of research and development/strategy for the Kansas City Royals. He was on staff for a World Series championship in 2015, less than three years after working with Math Professor Gabe Chandler to publish a statistical analysis of minor league data.

“Talking to Guy [Stevens] over the years, I ask, ‘What do we need to be doing on campus to make these kids better candidates for these internships and for these jobs?’” Pericolosi says. “He gave some suggestions in terms of, ‘They need to be doing creative, innovative projects on their own.’ The driving force for getting this technology on campus was initially to help our kids who want to go into analytics. Also, we’re in a heavy-data era of baseball even more so than before, and it’s going to give us good data to evaluate our players as well.”

Five of the 15 students in the class play baseball for the Sagehens. One of them, catcher and math major Jack Hanley ’20, worked for the Oakland Athletics two summers ago and spent last summer as an associate in quantitative analysis with the New York Yankees. This October, he watched his former colleagues advance to the American League Championship Series.

“It’s definitely very rewarding to know that whatever small role I played this summer in making the team better, it paid dividends,” says Hanley, whose description of his research for the Yankees is vague. That’s because he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect what amount to industry secrets.

Not all the alumni putting data analysis to work for major league teams are former baseball players. Jake Coleman ’13 played Ultimate Frisbee at Pomona but completed a Ph.D. in statistics at Duke University in May and joined the Los Angeles Dodgers in August as a senior quantitative analyst. Nor are they all men: Christina Williamson ’17, a former water polo player and swimmer who majored in math, was featured by The Athletic as one of 35 people under 35 shaping the game of baseball for her work with the Yankees using biomechanical data to aid player development and reduce injuries.

Pomona, Stevens is confident, is gaining a reputation in the game.

“If you think about how small the sport is, with only 30 teams, and how well-connected it is, there’s a pretty good chance if you’re in baseball, you know someone who knows someone who went to Pomona,” he says. “A lot of these jobs in baseball, it’s the same set of skills that translate anywhere: If you’re working with data, it’s curiosity and creativity and thinking outside the box. And Pomona trains you for that 100%, whether it’s baseball or finance or whatever else.”

Baseball analytics once was based on information available in a box score, but has evolved rapidly in the era since it was popularized by the 2003 book Moneyball and the movie that followed. It is now decidedly high-tech, requiring expensive equipment that Pericolosi was able to purchase for the course through Pomona’s Hahn Teaching with Technology Grants. He’s in the process of acquiring a second Rapsodo that gathers hitting data, measuring such things such as exit velocity—the speed of the ball off the bat—launch angle, 3D ball flight and expected landing location. Blast Motion swing sensors that attach to the knob of a bat are yet another tool in an array of devices that are used in training to aid the development of players and to help shape strategies.

Though some of the students in the class chose the course as an intriguing elective—Noah Sasaki ’20 thinks it could help him in a planned sports media career—those who play baseball are earnestly using the data to improve their skills and approaches. Analyzing spin data has helped catcher Jake Lialios ’20 and pitchers Luka Green ’20 and Simon Heck ’22 determine a particular pitcher on the staff should throw higher in the strike zone because the spin rate makes his fastball appear higher than it is. Green suggests data also could be used to recognize injuries.

“If your slider spin rate gets cut in half, your elbow probably hurts—and sometimes people don’t tell anyone,” he says.

Hanley plans to use bat sensor data to study swing paths in a senior thesis supervised by Chandler, the math professor and former assistant baseball coach whose mentorship helped launch Stevens’ career. After Stevens showed Chandler a trove of minor league data he was struggling to shape into a project, the pair joined forces and published an article in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports in 2012. That, plus an introduction from Chandler to an East Coast statistics professor who also worked with the New York Mets, helped Stevens break into Major League Baseball.

“At that point, people at Pomona realized this is something that one can do,” Chandler says. “I don’t know if people were thinking this before they decided to enroll here, but all of a sudden we went from having almost no math major baseball players to having two or three a year.”

Hanley, who communicated with Stevens even before arriving at Pomona, would love to follow the same sort of path. For his thesis, he is building on research he began with the A’s to study swing mechanics through functional data analysis, a statistical method Chandler calls “cutting-edge stuff.”

“What I’m really interested in is the function of position or acceleration over time—not just to reduce the entire function down to one point, but to use the entire function in data analysis,” Hanley says. “Generally, the project is to look at these swings and see how much information we can really glean. Let’s not limit ourselves in terms of format or data structure. Let’s see what we can really do with this stuff.”

After graduation, Hanley hopes to land a position with a baseball team, but he notes that more and more baseball analytics researchers have graduate school training and he might also go that route after a couple of years. Peter Xenopoulos ’18, who has worked for the Philadelphia Phillies as a quantitative analyst associate, is now a Ph.D. student in computer science at NYU, and Mike Dairyko ’13 earned a Ph.D. in applied math at Iowa State and works as a data scientist for the Milwaukee Brewers, though he is on the business side. “I do think this is something where Pomona is getting a reputation,” Hanley says. “It’s really a great breeding ground, a great incubator for baseball analytics in college.”

Pomona’s Baseball Analysts

The following is a list of recent Pomona alumni who have worked for MLB teams in roles related to data and analytics:

Drew Hedman ’09
Run Production Coordinator
Arizona Diamondbacks

Guy Stevens ’13
Senior Director, Research & Development/Strategy
Kansas City Royals

Jake Coleman ’13
Senior Quantitative Analyst
Los Angeles Dodgers

Mike Dairyko ’13
Senior Manager, Data Science, Business Analytics
Milwaukee Brewers

Jake Bruml ’15
Pro Scouting Intern
Boston Red Sox

Kevin Brice ’16
Quantitative Analysis Assistant
Los Angeles Angels

Simon Rosenbaum ’16
Assistant, Baseball Development
Tampa Bay Rays

Dylan Quantz ’16
Player Development Assistant
Atlanta Braves

Christina Williamson ’17
Research Analyst, Performance Science
New York Yankees

Peter Xenopolous ’18
Former Quantitative Analyst Associate
Philadelphia Phillies

Bryce Rogan ’18
Quantitative Analysis Assistant
Los Angeles Angels

Andrew Brown ’19
Apprentice, Baseball Analytics
Texas Rangers

Jack Hanley ’20
Former Summer Associate
New York Yankees

Nolan McCafferty ’20
Former Quantitative Analyst Intern
Baltimore Orioles

CASH. BABY. BOOM. Stocks with clever ticker symbols such as these continue to outperform the market as a whole, a new study has confirmed.

The study’s authors, Professor of Economics Gary Smith, along with recent Pomona graduates Naomi Baer ’19 and Erica Barry ’19 studied the performance of a portfolio of 82 stocks and found that companies with clever tickers outperformed the market from 2006 to 2018.

This new study is a follow up to a 2009 study in which Professor Smith and his co-authors Alex Head ’05 and Julia Wilson ’05 found that a portfolio of stocks with clever ticker symbols beat the market by a substantial margin during the years 1984–2005. Smith and his co-authors re-examined the 2009 study’s surprising conclusion by updating the analysis for the subsequent years 2006 through 2018. They pursued the new study to demonstrate the resiliency of this phenomenon with respect to both the original clever-ticker stocks and a more recent set of clever-ticker NASDAQ stocks, a phenomenon that strongly contradicts the efficient market hypothesis.

The authors replicated the earlier methodology with a new list, focusing on NASDAQ stocks, which historically use four-digit ticker symbols, in contrast to the NYSE and AMEX, which use three or fewer characters. Examples include PZZA for a pizza company, BDAY for online party supply retailer and BOOM for an explosives company, among others.

“For example, WOOF, the ticker for VCA Antech, which operates a network of animal hospitals and diagnostic laboratories, is a lot more amusing and memorable than something boring like VCAA or VCAN,” says Smith.

A possible explanation to this stock overperformance is that memory involves the acquisition, storage, retention and retrieval of information and the understanding of human memory suggests that clever tickers may heighten investors’ recall of companies, according to Smith and his co-authors.

Running Dry

You cannot see an aquifer. What you can see, however, is the impact of these underground water systems, as revealed in this artful image of the vast irrigated fields above the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies 174,000 square miles of the Great Plains. W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History Char Miller—one of the co-authors of the third edition of Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land (Nebraska, 2018)—describes monstrous roaring pumps that suck the ancient water stored deep beneath these green-hued circles into an array of pipes to irrigate sorghum, corn, cotton and wheat, or to nourish livestock.

“The massive Ogallala, which runs from Wyoming to Texas, has been one of the world’s most productive aquifers, not least because it has been crucial to the growth of the global food system,” he explains. “Yet it is an open question how long it can continue to sustain its vital role, a question that drove John Opie, Kenna Lang Archer and me to co-author this book.”

“Although the book encompasses half a billion years of the region’s history,” Miller adds, “its next-to-last sentence is perhaps the most unsettling: ‘The clear, fresh waters of the Ogallala are being gulped down at 10 times their trickling pace of replacement.’ That demand is accelerating with the exponential growth in the world’s population. By 2050, the Ogallala may be exhausted.”

Ninety-Five Percent Perspiration

To describe the process of casting in metal, Professor of Art Michael O’Malley offers a paraphrase of Thomas Edison’s famous remark about genius: “It’s 5 percent inspiration and 95 percent just hard work.” The metal pour itself, he explains, is one of the last in a long series of intricate steps, each involving a great deal of painstaking labor. In fact, he says, “I often think of casting as a finishing process, in the same way I think of painting something made of wood.”

The molten aluminum in this photo was to be cast as the legs of a conference table, part of a project intended to engage students in personalizing Pomona’s new Studio Art Hall when it opened a few years ago. “We wanted to connect a teaching experience with a lived experience with future objects,” O’Malley says. “So the idea was to build as much furniture as possible.”

The project grew out of O’Malley’s longtime interest in the narratives encapsulated in the built environment. “Why does the world look the way that it does?” he asks. “And what is it that we can do to, perhaps, populate the built environment with objects that have alternative narratives and signal different kinds of values, different kinds of positions in the world?”

Seabirds and Island Ecology

Fresh out of college, Professor of Biology Nina Karnovsky took a job studying seabirds—and she was hooked for life. “Seabirds are sentinels of what’s happening in the ocean,” she says. “There are so many stories about human impacts on bird populations; there’s climate change that is changing the food web, the temperature, the winds. And the birds are responding.”

Over the years, she’s studied penguins in Antarctica, little auks in the Arctic and, closer to home, seabirds on the Channel Islands. “We’ve studied the prey availability and bird distribution around Santa Barbara Island,” she says. “We’ve done cruises with students where we were watching the birds, doing the net-tows, the physics measurements and the chemistry. And I’ve taken students back to the islands for field trips as well, including Anacapa.”

Anacapa Island (pictured) is home to one of the great success stories in conservation. In recent years, the careful elimination of invasive, egg-eating rats on the island has brought the Scripps’s murrelet out of the shadow of extinction. Last year, Karnovsky took her Advanced Animal Ecology class to Anacapa to participate in an accompanying effort to restore native plants. Unfortunately, she says, “there aren’t many success stories like that in island ecology.”

Cold Case from a Hot Planet

This NASA image of Maat Mons, one of the largest volcanoes on Venus, was created from radar data gathered by the Magellan spacecraft as it orbited the seething hot planet. That was a quarter-century ago, but the total amount of data Magellan sent back during its four-year life was so vast that scientists like Eric Grosfils, the Minnie B. Cairns Memorial Professor of Geology, are still digging through it to make new discoveries.

“One of the primary things that we’re doing right now is trying to understand how volcanoes grow and evolve,” Grosfils says. “For a long time we’ve been looking at what controls where magma goes beneath the volcano—why it goes straight up and erupts at the summit, for example, or goes out along a rift zone. The eruption that just happened in Hawaii underscores the fact that even at one of the most heavily studied and instrumented volcanoes in the world, we still get surprised all the time.”

Studying volcanoes on another planet, Grosfils says, is a good complement to studying them on the Earth, partly because it offers a glimpse of how volcanoes evolve in different environments, but also because the volcanic record in a place like Venus is so pristine. “Venus is not subjected to lots of erosion,” he explains. “It doesn’t have oceans that obscure the surface. For reasons like these, there is a pretty complete record of their evolution preserved for us to see.”

Grosfils says fresh discoveries still lurk in those mountains of Magellan data. For instance, last summer, two students in his lab—Brooke Carlson ’20 and Harvey Mudd student Gabi Bellino ’19—used the data to map in detail, for the first time, two large volcanoes, Dzalarhons Mons and Kali Mons. The result? “Among other things, our mapping revealed that the size of each volcano is two to five times what it was understood to be before we mapped,” Grosfils says, “and now we know the sequence of events that built each volcano from the ground up.”

Fossils on the Cover

Professor Robert Gaines (left) in Kootenay National Park with recent Claremont Colleges graduates Iris Holzer (Scripps ’17) and Ellie Ellis (Pitzer ’18 )

The alien-looking fossils unearthed by a team of scientists co-led by Pomona College Professor of Geology Robert Gaines were the subject of the cover story in the November 2018 issue of Science.

The article, “Cracking the Cambrian,” takes readers to Kootenay National Park in Canada and the fossil-rich sites that Gaines and the team discovered in 2012. The sites are home to Burgess Shale fossil beds where more than 10,000 specimens, including unfamiliar and new animals, have already been found by the team. The animal fossils are from the Cambrian period, which saw a sudden explosion of animal life, and offer an increased understanding of early animal evolution on Earth.

“More than 80 percent of diversity of life leaves no fossil record, but here we have fossils that offer a remarkably complete picture during this ‘pop’ in evolutionary history,” says Gaines. The fossils, which show soft tissues, including eyes, muscle bands and gills, have been found along a 10-mile swath of what was once sea floor, now located high in the Canadian Rockies.

Among the unique finds this past year were new fossils that the researchers nicknamed “spaceships” because of their sleek shape. The largest of these was dubbed “the mothership” (naturally). “These animals were relatively giant predators of the Cambrian seas, ranging up to one meter,” Gaines says. “They were swimmers with giant raptorial claws at the front of the head, just in front of the mouth.”

Gaines began working in the area in 2008 and has been back every year since, with the exception of 2011. Though the weather is volatile, the terrain steep and rugged, the grizzly and black bears abundant and the living conditions primitive, he plans to keep going back.

“I’m living my 5-year-old self’s dream,” he says. “My mother brought me a trilobite from a trip when I was a boy, and immediately my enthusiasm for dinosaurs faded. I was intrigued by the idea of this much deeper past and the early history of complex life on Earth.

“The Burgess Shale is perhaps the most important fossil site in the world and is on every paleontologist’s bucket list. I still can’t believe that I am actually working here. And the opportunity to make paradigm-shifting contributions through the discovery of this entirely new fossil area in the Rockies, rich with new and unexpected animal forms, is incredibly rewarding.”

Pakistani Schools Reimagined

Pakistani children on their way to school.

For more than a decade, Stedman-Sumner Professor of Economics Tahir Andrabi and a team of researchers have been conducting economic surveys on education in Pakistan’s Punjab province. They’ve tested about 35,000 primary schoolchildren in math, language, civics and other subjects and distributed report cards to families. For illiterate parents, they’ve explained the results at village gatherings and town meetings.

The results have echoed throughout the educational system in the region.

“Giving Pakistani families information improved their welfare as consumers of education,” says Andrabi. “It lowered the fees private schools charge and induced lower-quality private schools to improve their test scores. Public schools responded to this information by raising their quality and increasing their enrollment. We are also finding that these effects persist in these villages even after eight years.”

The surveys also exposed some problems, including the difficulty of retaining teachers and the need for better training and better resources.

For Andrabi, education is a “kind of ecosystem. It has teachers, textbook providers, policymakers, regulators. I can name 20 different actors,” he says. “Our job as researchers is to identify the frictions in all these relationships and to think about the barriers to innovation, so people can think about their solutions to their own problems.”

The initial problem for policymakers, says Andrabi, “had been how to get kids in school, particularly girls and the rural poor. As more children entered schools, construction increased and researchers started to notice that it was not enough. The demand for education, for women, for girls, the aspirations parents have for their children are very high. So the question now is how to respond to that need.”

Andrabi has been part of that response, traveling around the world and collaborating with colleagues in education and economics to “reimagine” a school of education. Invited by Pakistan’s leading philanthropist and a founding trustee of its largest private university to work on the project, Andrabi initially intended to lay the groundwork for the new school.

Instead, he is taking a sabbatical to become the inaugural dean of the Lahore University of Management Sciences School of Education, working with eight faculty members and 40 students in a master of philosophy program on educational leadership.

“Any problem that you can think of in the world,” he says, “improving education is going to help.”

Sacrifice & Survival

Tomás Sandoval Sr. (second from left) in a scene from Ring of Red: A Barrio Story.

Stories of patriotism, sacrifice and survival are important themes in the lives of many Chicanos who served in the Vietnam War. And bringing some of those stories to the public through theatre has been a multiyear project for Professor of History and Chicano Studies Tomás Summers Sandoval, who recently staged a new play at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles based on the experiences of Chicano veterans.

Adding a personal note to the work was Summers Sandoval’s father, Tomás Sandoval Sr., who joined the production as an actor.

Based on oral histories collected by Summers Sandoval and his students over a period of five years and written as interwoven testimonios—testimonial monologues—Ring of Red: A Barrio Story features stories of post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, family love and friction—and what it has meant for this generation of Chicanos to live with the scars of war.

The play was directed by Pomona College lecturer and alumna Rose Portillo ’75.

“Chicanos are generally misunderstood as a people,” says Summers Sandoval. “The media often portrays us as a threat, but Chicanos have been interwoven into the U.S. story for a long time, and we have given a lot to this country.”

History and the Court

A copy of the United States Bill of Rights

For Amanda Hollis-Brusky, the 2008 Supreme Court decision about an individual’s right to own a gun is a story about the lawyers, activists and law students who laid the groundwork for a radical new interpretation of the Second Amendment.

“For 150 years, courts interpreted that first part of the clause, the well-regulated militia, as limiting the scope of the right to keep and bear arms,” says Hollis-Brusky, associate professor of politics and author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. “Until the 1970s and 1980s, scholars who were for a robust Second Amendment were lamenting the fact that courts had limited the right and had accepted a lot of regulation because they were putting too much emphasis on the collective, the militia.”

The District of Columbia vs. Heller, a case challenging strict handgun regulations in Washington, D.C., initiated what Hollis-Brusky describes as a two-step process necessary for the court to change a law. “The first thing you need is at least five justices who agree with you. It’s a necessary condition, but it’s not sufficient,” she says. “Those five justices need to have the legitimacy of outside legal scholarship that justifies their opinion.”

The scaffolding for the 2008 case, says Hollis-Brusky, was provided by the Federalist Society, home to conservative and libertarian legal scholars.

“Long before the Supreme Court embraced the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment, the Federalist Society had created a robust academic network to support that idea,” she says. Hollis-Brusky is skeptical that the most recent interpretation of the Second Amendment is the last.

“We talk about constitutional principles, but I think very few on the left or the right adhere so steadfastly to those principles,” says Hollis-Brusky. “The terms of the debate— ‘Are you an originalist or are you a living constitutionalist?’—have shifted. You still need to look to history, but how do you use that history and how do you take into account contemporary circumstances? Those are the big driving questions.”

In the classroom and in her work with students on research, Hollis-Brusky says she sees the next generation of activists. “There is less cynicism and more interest in being strategic in how they engage with the system. One of the things I like to tell them in the post-2016 world is that this is a time of great political possibility, for better or for worse. Things we never imagined would happen are now happening. You have to throw out all the rules about what we ought to expect, and that opens up a lot of possibilities for people who want to reimagine the way we are.”

The Shape of the City

Cranes above a Los Angeles skyline.

The drive into Los Angeles reveals a stark contrast. In some areas, towering cranes mark construction sites where office towers, hotels and apartments are being built. Elsewhere, dilapidated buildings, warehouses and parking lots remain, images of urban blight.

Why are some areas redeveloped, while others are not? What roles do zoning and density regulations play? These are some of the questions Associate Professor of Economics Bowman Cutter is trying to answer by combining zoning and property data with Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to create redevelopment maps of parts of Los Angeles County.

“People haven’t linked the property records over time like this before,” says Cutter, an environmental economist and an expert on urban land use. Funded by a Haynes Foundation faculty fellowship, his work will generate a dynamic map to help policymakers and stakeholders visualize redevelopment patterns over time.

“I’d like to look in a much more detailed way than anybody’s done, property by property, on how these density restrictions affect what you build and when you build,” Cutter says. “What I’m trying to say is, if we had different regulations, would the shape of the city be different?”