MLB

America’s pastime is based on impossible math

For a professional sport, there is an inordinate amount of math involved in baseball. With the seemingly endless amount of complex statistics (FIP? ERA+? LIPS?), America’s pastime is definitely a numbers game. So it may surprise you that there is an incredibly basic (albeit trivial) mathematical error in the Major League Baseball rulebook, one that has been there for more than a century.

MLB

Since the modern rules of baseball were standardized in 1900, Rule 1.05 in the MLB handbook has mandated that the top edge of home plate must be 17 inches long, the two sides must be 8.5 inches, and each of the two legs that form the back of the plate must be 12 inches. As “Now I Know” newsletter author (and Mets fan) Dan Lewis points out, “That’s a problem. Math-wise, that is.” You can use your high school math knowledge to point out that, technically, exactly zero MLB games adhere strictly to this rule.

While the rulebook doesn’t specifically say that the two legs must form a right angle, but the two converging legs form the foul lines, which are supposed to be two corners of a square baseball diamond. A diagram, also in the rulebook, further implies a right angle at home plate.

Problem is, those numbers don’t exactly add up. Let us explain.

Remember learning the Pythagorean theorem in math class and thinking, “There’s no way in hell that this will serve any practical purpose in my life”? As it turns out, you can use that function to prove that every regulation home plate breaks Rule 1.05.

Or, as Wolfram MathSpeak puts it, home plate is “not physically realizable.”

As trivial as this may be, it leads one to wonder why this rule hasn’t been changed in the 116 years it has been in play.

Cut out the sides of the home plate, and you have a right triangle with two legs 12 inches long and a hypotenuse of 17 inches. The Pythagorean theorem says that if you add the square of each triangle leg together, it must equal the square of the hypotenuse. Well, 12 multiplied by itself is 144. Add that to another 144, and you get 288. 17 squared? 289.

The difference is almost microscopic, but no matter which way you slice it, something is off. If home plate indeed has a right angle at the tip, the measurements don’t adhere to Rule 1.05, and a manager could technically protest. If each side of home plate has the exact measurements as laid out in the rulebook, the angle is slightly greater than 90 degrees. Oops.

It’s essentially a rounding error that, corrected, would result in a tiny fraction of an inch being shaved off each side and warping the angles slightly.

As trivial as the discrepancy may be, it leads one to wonder why this rule hasn’t been changed in the 116 years it has been in play. If MLB front offices can use numbers to figure out how many wins a player adds over a season, can’t the league use one of the most basic mathematical functions to disprove one of the first rules in the MLB rulebook? Is this “Whose Line Is It Anyway?,” where everything’s made up and the rules don’t matter?

In a statement to The Post, MLB said, “The measurements of home plate are in line with the spirit of the rule,” and that they have no plans on changing it.

Fair enough, as long as the geometry teachers of the world don’t stage a protest in front of the commissioner’s office. Or maybe, just maybe, this is one more sign that the rules are made to be broken.