10 in 10: Youth Baseball Academy completes new Science of Baseball curriculum

From the time they arrived from Montreal before the 2005 season, the Nationals have been a mainstay in the Washington, D.C., sports scene. But the Nats are also very active in the community, working diligently over the past decade to touch the lives of many in the region and proving that baseball has a further reach than wins and losses, balls and strikes, batters and pitchers. Each Thursday through mid-August, MASNsports.com's Byron Kerr will explore the Nationals' community outreach efforts, showing how far their reach has extended and how deeply committed to Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area the Nationals are.

The Nationals Youth Baseball Academy has enjoyed another successful summer of programming and this quarter introduced a new curriculum that demonstrates how intertwined the game of baseball is with science.

Executive director Tal Alter explained how the curriculum was initiated at the Youth Baseball Academy.

"We have launched a new curriculum that is called the Science of Baseball," Alter said. "We have developed (this) in partnership with the University of Arizona Department of Engineering to do that. We have a 20-lesson curriculum that each grade is going through, teaching the common core standards of math and science through baseball concepts."

The curriculum is called STEM for science, technology, engineering and math. The curriculum takes five weeks to complete and finishes up Friday. The program then wraps up Aug. 7.

Here is more on the curriculum:

Alter said in one recent session, the scholar-athletes learned on the field an example of angular momentum in baseball.

"They're learning about how you run the bases," Alter said. "If you sprint from home to first and you take a 90-degree turn and run to second, that's slower than taking a banana turn around first and having momentum toward second.

"It's one thing to discuss angular momentum, and it's another to then go out on the field and apply it and to time yourself running the bases one way and then running the bases another way. The kids were totally into it, and it was clear they were getting the learning objective from the activity as well."

As for the Academy, one of the signature community relations initiatives of the Nationals, Alter says in the program's third year of development, it is starting to build strength from within.

"It's in the process of developing, so the youth that have been here for a few years also are becoming the leaders of the program," Alter said. "So as we bring in new scholar-athletes, they are seeing the elder statesmen and following what they do.

"Tied to that as also is baseball was new to a lot of the kids a couple of years ago, but now its something in Year 4 that they're excited to do and the fact that you can tie learning to it - and do so in a really rigorous and fun way."

For more information on the Youth Baseball Academy, click here.

Miss any of the previous installments of "10 in 10" detailing the Nationals' community outreach efforts? Here is the list to date:

June 11 - Dream Foundation builds off success to introduce new initiative
June 18 - Nationals look to improve D.C. Little Leagues with new uniforms, equipment and fields
June 25 - Diabetes Care Complex critical to Dream Foundation mission
July 2 - ziMS Foundation has raised more than $1 million for MS research
July 9 - Span starts his own foundation to help single-parent families
July 16 - Storen makes a pitch for D.C. Public Library summer reading program
July 23 - Scherzer signs on to Cards for a Cause fundraiser