Pebble Hunting: Baseball`s Paper Airplane Problem by Sam Miller

July 22, 2013

by Sam Miller

Game story template: Clever juxtaposition, personal detail, pun, or fun fact; summary of what happened in the game (winner, key performance); nut graf putting larger significance of win/loss into context; quote from manager; transition into chronological description, over course of a few paragraphs, of game?s action, perhaps interspersed with quotes from relevant players; quote from pitcher/offensive hero/Torii Hunter; description of the paper airplanes in the stadium; conclusion.

?As the game ground to a crawl in the late innings,? the LAist wrote last week, ?each pitch taking on more importance on both sides, the scene throughout the stadium began to resemble the opening scene of M.I.A.'s ?Paper Planes? video. As the crowd of 50,796 got more and more restless, they decided to make their own entertainment, to give themselves something to cheer for as plane after plane get [sic] tantalyzingly close to touch [sic] the field.?

Paper planes are having a moment. Two weeks earlier, while Skip Schumaker was on the mound, a well-crafted plane landed with a flourish between the mound and home plate:

And a couple months before that, at the same stadium,

Source: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=21274

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