HOWDY. That was a hell of a weekend for Aggie Baseball. 50 runs in three games is pretty good. Even more astonishing was the dearth of bunting, the staple of many Aggie stickball outings. According to an internal GBH report,
According to 203's resident sabermetrics analyst, 1.33% of the outs from the weekend came via the sac bunt
Thanks, Matt. I don’t really understand what it means, but it seems to be super low, like probably one bunt or something. We’ll go with that, one bunt.
The increased volume of bat swings may have have had an immediate scientific effect on the meteorology of this weekend. Forget a butterfly flapping its wings down in Australia; when you suddenly transform a couple dozen bunt attempts into full bat swings and the pressure and temperatures are just right in the Texas atmosphere, baby, you got a storm brewing.
Just look at this sucker that popped up Sunday night, plowing across the width of the entire state:
There were tornadoes touching down in San Antonio, power lines knocked over clear up through Austin, schools closed down, and all manner of mayhem associated with the crushing Texas thunderstorms that came rolling down off the western plains in the wake of the Aggies’ total offensive bombardment.
“The reason tornadoes are scary is that all buildings in the country are designed to withstand maximum hurricane force winds for that area, but tornado wind speeds are so much higher that it is unfeasible to design to withstand them. So when a tornado or close-to-tornado wind speed hits a house/building/structure, that structure is fucked. Much like Bowling Green’s outfield, amirite?”
—Chuck, resident expert on making-things-not-fall-apart and non-baseball watcher
In addition to the 50-70mph winds last night, the storm dumped upwards of 1.5 inches of rain in one hour in some areas. This is no doubt a secondary natural side effect from the weekend: an attempt to regrow some of the grass worn out on Olsen Field by the many many walks the Bowling Green Head Coach made to the pitching mound in an attempt to decipher some cure for the onslaught of Aggie offense.
So don’t forget your ponchos this season, folks. Depending on what the Ags come out doing during midweek games, we may be in for some Jim Cantore fantasy-grade weekend outings. The Olsen Bat Effect is hopefully here to stay.
At the time of this writing there is no word on whether or not this weekend’s scientific findings have affected Noel Mazzone’s third-and-short bubble screen philosophy yet. He may be sacrificing the allure of an immediate impact on the weather and playing the long con: a redistribution in the earth’s gravitational pull on Kyle Field built on thousands of slowly-imploding vortexes over several seasons. Hope it’s worth it.