"An Academic Home Run: Baseball, Umpiring and Mathematics"

America's most popular past-time of baseball can be applied to mathematics by teachers by weaving real life examples, stories, and history into mathematics classes to create a learning environment for today's students that makes the educational experience memorable and enjoyable.Mathematical word problems and stories are two common approaches used by teachers that are explained in this paper. Mathematics, Academics, and Baseballthe umpire with raised arms! a trail of dust still circling the infield 1 Haiku, Japanese poetry, captures in poetic form the moments in every baseball game that make fans catch their breath and pause while the pitcher looks for a sign, the moment a rookie gets picked off first, or the instant the batter lashes a homer into the night sky, just before the crowd explodes onto its feet. 2 Mathematics as well captures the essence of the game in statistics and numbers in a way that can cause students to jump to their feet in excitement about a subject otherwise often thought as dreary, tough, or unimportant.Many situations that take place on a baseball field can easily be carried over and analyzed in an academic environment in search of fun, interesting academic goals.Not only is baseball useful in helping students learn mathematic problems, but baseball history also provides a comparison of different eras of the game along with the different statistics of each period.Higher order thinking problems can be derived from the history of the game. 3 When one thinks of mathematics, the sport of baseball is increasingly used by mathematics teachers who want to decrease emphasis on routine procedural skills and increase emphasis on real-world uses of mathematics and multi-step problem solving. 4 The combination of the terms "baseball" and "mathematics" is so popular that over 31,000 Google sites reference the words "together.There are many reasons why these subjects are often combined.This paper discusses these reasons and explains benefits students can derive from numerous types of mathematics problems.Finally, two examples are included which the author uses in teaching to bring life to mathematics through real life baseball stories, examples and problems. The Relationship of Baseball and Mathematicscollege ballpark fungoes one after another into the blue sky 5