I'm sure you've gotten accustomed to getting two or three articles a week, and have wondered why I've been slacking the past week or so. Here's the deal:
First, my family has been trying to kill me with any one of the various illness going around this season. I've not gotten strep, H1N1, pneumonia, or just the run-of-the-mill flu that my wife and kids have had this season, but I can tell my body's been working overtime to fight everything off, so my energy level hasn't been as high as it usually is. The result: a little less energy for the softball site resulting in less articles.
All that said, the real reason I've not written as much as in the past is because I'm working on some huge softball projects that are taking a lot of time to research. Some of these are:
1) Determining the best softball bat sizes for girls aged 7 to 14. This has involved obtaining and measuring 3 dozen or so bats, and then having a bunch of girls swing them measuring their bat speed, then crunching the numbers to determine a model that the average coach or parent can use. If I were going for a doctorate in statistics or physiology, this would be a perfect project (hmmm...something to consider for the future). I hope to have the experiments done by the end of the year and then publish the results in the next few months after.
2) Determining exactly how effective "little ball" is in Fast Pitch softball for College Softball. This is the project taking the most of my free time, as I'm having to collect data by hand from various game logs from this past season. I hope to identify such things as exactly when does it make sense to bunt, how effective bunting is, how effective slap hitting is, what situations should the steal be executed, and such.
3) Finally, I'm looking to dive deeper into the Division 1 season stats on which I've already written. However, I'm taking the time to learn "R" (which is a statistical analysis application) because I want to check out some pretty esoteric stuff -- more than I can do with my SPSS software or an Excel spreadsheet.
I will still write at least an article a week while working on these projects, but the number of articles may be closer to 1 than the 3 that you are used to reading. My apologies in advance for that, but I hope the resulting articles from the projects listed above will be worth the wait!
