Estrada, the star pitcher for MIT's baseball team, is signing a contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers organization, after the team selected him in the 7th round of the Major League Baseball draft on July 14. The right-hander, whose stellar stuff earned significant attention from MLB scouts, will be reporting soon to the Dodgers' instructional camp in Arizona. From the outside, MIT might seem like an atypical starting point for a pitching career, but it has helped Estrada in multiple ways: by providing a strong baseball program in itself, and, more subtly, by reinforcing the value of systematic improvement, at a time when baseball pitching increasingly resembles, well, engineering. Meanwhile, pitching in professional baseball more than ever involves 'pitch design' or 'pitch shaping.' For a decade now, major-league teams have used high-speed cameras to determine which pitches work best. In turn, pitchers are often reverse-engineering parts of their arsenals, by starting with the...
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