Revolutions Per Minute: A Bowling Story

Mike Salfino is the Wall Street Journal’s extremely sharp sports analyst, with a focus on the numbers side of things. Usually he looks at baseball and football, casting a gimlet eye on weak analysis and demonstrating an enthusiastic love for the metric that reveals hidden value. Not only for fantasy players, but also fans of the game.

jasonbelmonte

He has a story today that brings his usual acuity to a somewhat surprising subject: Bowling.

It seems that a young bowler by the name of Jason Belmonte is turning the world of keglers over and over and over really fast by delivering the bowling ball with forward speed and a ton of spin. Mike explains it all here.

The one question I have. The ball is traveling 20 miles an hour down a lane that is 60 feet long. The travel time is measured in seconds, but the metric is scaled to a minute? It seems to me the number would be more manageable and meaningful if they scaled it to the second.

60 revolutions per second. Sounds good to me.

And here you get what the Wall Street Journal can’t offer: video.

http://youtu.be/CDvK6brkXGA