12/13/2024 Taylor Parks
Written by Taylor Parks
MechSE alum Don Slavik (BSEM 1984, MSME 1986) has found a way to apply his technical background to his passion for baseball.
Slavik recently published his first baseball technical paper, “An Infield Hit Model From the 2023 MLB Season: ‘Hit ‘Em Where They Ain’t,’” in the Baseball Research Journal. The title pays homage to a quote from Hall of Fame player Wee Willie Keeler, who is remembered as “baseball’s greatest place-hitter.”
Slavik used Python to process roughly 163,000 publicly available data points from every Major League Baseball (MLB) game played during the 2023 season—in other words, regardless of team or location. He then implemented a predictive model to investigate probabilities for batted balls and how these inform hit totals for individual players and teams. He also performed hit simulations to highlight the impact of launch speed, batted ball type, and spray angle on the resulting hit. He presented a case study from these findings at the 2024 Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) convention.
Originally from the Chicagoland area, Slavik came to Illinois to study applied mechanics. “I had a great time [at Illinois],” he said. “The program had a great mix of applied and experimental work.”
As a sophomore, he took an undergraduate research position and assisted graduate students with materials-focused thesis research. “This was before we had PowerPoint and Excel, so I was drafting graphs by hand for Professor Huseyin Sehitoglu and Professor Emeritus Peter Kurath,” he recalled of preparing results.
Slavik soon advanced to running his own testing machine in Talbot Lab, working with samples of various industrial materials. “I would vary temperature and strain in cyclical loading until failure,” he said. “The results could inform various design applications.”
Pursuing his master’s degree was a natural next step for Slavik to continue immersing himself in materials research. During his time at Illinois, Slavik also met his future wife, then a student in speech & hearing science who also earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the U of I.
“We actually lived in the same hometown, but met through my sister while we were both at Illinois,” Slavik recalled.
After earning his master’s degree, Slavik moved his family to Ohio to work for GE Aerospace. He started as a life methods engineer before returning to academia to earn his PhD from the University of Virginia. He then held a consulting role with GE for more than 25 years.
“I worked on different material systems,” he said. “[I focused on] component durability, trying to understand how long components last before failure so that they could be safely removed from service long before that happens.”
Now retired from GE, Slavik is the sole member of his own business, Don Slavik AAA Consulting. He has also found opportunity to engage more fully in the baseball community as a member of the Cincinnati Reds’ grounds crew, which handles every facet of field maintenance.
“We’ll prep the infield, chalk the lines, prep the mound and the bullpens, repair home plate, and water everything,” he said. The crew also springs into action to protect the field during bouts of inclement weather.
“Being around the players and being on a major league field is sweet,” said Slavik, who plans to continue working with the grounds crew as well as doing aerospace consultation and updating his baseball research topics. “I love every day that I do it.”