KWAAAN!
— by Mario Crescibene
“My name is Khan.” Benedict Cumberbatch’s intensity cut through the air as he spoke to Chris Pine in the brig of the USS Enterprise. I lay sprawled out on my couch with Star Trek Into Darkness playing on the TV, my phone in hand.
I don’t know about you, but I find it almost impossible to watch a movie anymore without having something on my phone to scroll through. I pulled up my MLB app and started looking through Steven Kwan’s game log. The first half of his season had been horrendous
— before the All-Star break he had slashed .225/.332/.282.
Not typical Steven Kwan.
But after the All-Star break, something had changed. His season line had now climbed all the way to .268/.369/.332. Looking at his game log, the hit streaks leapt off the screen:
A 6-game hit streak. One hitless game. Another 6-game streak. One hitless game. Then 11 straight games with a hit. And in each of those hit-less games, he’d still managed to draw a walk.
Opposing pitchers had made Kwan look lost in the first half of the season. But now? Now Kwan was looking like a .400 hitter again.
At that moment, the TV screen caught my eye as Spock’s face twisted in anguish as he unleashed a tortured cry into the void:
“KHAAAAAN!”
I couldn’t help but smile. Surely opposing pitchers had screamed Kwan’s name with that same tortured desperation after surrendering yet another clutch hit.
The Guardians’ broadcast team had been saying it for weeks — “He’s back! He’s back!” But I wondered if there was a single moment when everything changed? Or was it a slow progression that took time to build before finally showing up in the box scores?
One person would surely know.
When I got to Professor Saber’s office, the door looked just like an airlock to a spaceship. I reached out to knock, but the door slid open with a satisfying pneumatic hiss before my knuckles even made contact. On the other side was what might as well have been the bridge of the USS Enterprise:
Professor Saber’s office walls were covered in screens displaying star maps, warp speed readouts, and scrolling data from every corner of the galaxy. Blinking control panels lined the walls, and right in the center of it all, where her desk normally sat was now a control panel with a captain’s chair — and there she was, sitting just like Captain Kirk — gold command uniform and all.
“Mario!” she exclaimed, both arms shooting up in her signature greeting. “Welcome aboard the Stat-ship Enterprise!”
I laughed and plopped down into the beanbag — which for whatever reason was untouched by the starship theme: still turquoise, still making a satisfying whoosh — sinking in like I always did.
“I love the stat-ship theme, Professor Saber,” I started, but she quickly corrected me.
“That’s Captain Saber,” she said, straightening up in her command chair with authority.
I laughed at how seriously she was taking herself. “Well, Captain Saber, I’ve got a stat question for you — but I think we may need to venture into uncharted statistical territory to answer it.”
Her eyes lit up immediately. That was always the right thing to say to Professor Saber.
“Uncharted statistical territory?” she said, as she began to punch in commands to the control panel. “Fire away, stat-cadet.”
“Steven Kwan’s first half of the season was horrendous. But something changed after the All-Star break and he’s been on an absolute tear ever since. The broadcast team keeps saying ‘he’s back’ — but I keep wondering — was there a single moment when something changed?”
She smiled as she finished setting the coordinates of our latest statistical adventure.
“Then our destination today, Mario, is change point analysis. But I’ll be honest with you — I’ve never taught it in an introductory statistics course. And you won’t find it in a standard textbook. This is genuinely advanced territory.” She paused for effect. “Are you ready to boldly go where no statistician has gone before?”
“Aye, Captain!” I said, shifting around inside the turquoise beanbag.
Captain Saber spun out of her command chair and walked briskly over to a glowing side console. She tapped a series of illuminated keys on the interface, bringing the wall-sized main viewer to life.
“Before we fire up the algorithms,” Saber said, “let’s scan the raw telemetry first.”
I squinted up at the screen. The three lines for his batting average, OBP, and SLG hovered in a flat, stagnant valley for weeks. But then, right in the middle of the graph, the lines took a sharp turn upward.
“You can see it easily,” I said. “It’s like he was on autopilot for two months, and then hit warp speed. But what’s the date where everything changed?”
“Let’s mark the exact moment where the vector shifts,” Saber said, turning toward the interface. “We don’t want to guess based on intuition — we want to test a precise boundary.”
Saber reached back to her console and tapped a command into the interface. A bright red, dashed vertical line flashed onto the viewer, cleanly dividing the graph into two distinct eras.
“That line marks June 29,” Saber explained, gesturing toward the red marker. “To find that exact date, the Stat-ship Enterprise’s computer didn’t just guess. It ran a piecewise linear regression, fitting two connected trend lines across every single date on the calendar to see where the trajectory truly changed.”
“Piecewise linear fit?” I asked, tilting my head.
“That’s right,” Saber said. “The computer tested every possible pivot point and picked the date that minimized total error. Before June 29th, his stats were basically flat. But starting June 29th, the slopes increased.”
“And is there a significant difference before and after June 29?” I asked.
“Very good, Mario! To test that,” Saber said as she tapped a quick command into her side console, “we’ll run a Welch’s t-test.”
As she hit “enter,” the main console hummed to life, processing the data before displaying a fresh readout on the screen.
“The p-values all came back well below 0.001 across three metrics,” Saber announced with a grin. “Statistically speaking, Mario, there was a significant change on June 29th. Pre-June 29th Steven Kwan and post-June 29th Steven Kwan are two entirely different hitters.”
“So June 29th really was the moment he hit warp speed,” I said, looking up at the viewer.
“The math confirms it,” Saber nodded. “Right at June 29th, he shifted into hyperdrive and never looked back.”
“Okay, so we know when the change happened,” I thought out loud, “but what changed exactly?”
The Professor walked back to her captain’s chair, taking a seat and swiveling to face me.
“That’s the thing, Mario,” she said. “Change point analysis can tell us when something changed, but it can’t tell us what changed, or why it changed. That’s something your readers will have to argue about.”
“One thing I’ve noticed watching his at-bats lately,” I replied, “is that Kwan has been mixing in a different bat. His normal bat has that hockey-puck style knob, but lately I’ve seen him step up carrying a traditional standard bat instead. I wonder if around June 29 he tweaked his gear or changed up his grip.”
“A fascinating observation,” Saber said, entering a quick note into her console. “A mechanical adjustment, an equipment tweak, or simply a shift in mindset could all be factors. The root cause remains open for debate. But the change point itself is indisputable. The most important thing, regardless of what caused Kwan’s improvement, is that he’s once again tormenting pitchers — just as much as Khan tormented Captain Kirk and Spock.”
Silence settled over the starship bridge. I looked down at my hands, then back up at the Professor dressed in her Star Trek gear.
“Captain?” I asked quietly.
“Yes, Mario?”
“Can I do it? Just once?”
Saber glanced around the bridge, then looked toward the closed pneumatic airlock door. “Classes don’t start for over a week, and I’m fairly certain there isn’t anyone else on this floor.” She gave a subtle, approving nod. “Permission granted.”
I leaned my head back all the way looking at the ceiling, clenched my fists tight, and let out a roar just like every pitcher Kwan has faced since June 29:
“KWAAAAAAAN!”
