LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. • What brought Cardinals shortstop Paul DeJong to the winter meetings Tuesday wasn’t his team-best 25 homers or his second-place finish in the National League Rookie of the Year voting but measures of a different kind.
He came to talk chemistry.
DeJong, accompanied by Dr. Lawrence Rocks, a chemist and professor from New York, appeared on MLB Network’s “MLB Now” program Tuesday to discuss a few of the experiments the two of them have done this winter. They looked at what is the ideal temperature for a baseball and new ways to view the ripple effect of concussions — all under the umbrella of a discipline Rocks proposes to call “sports chemistry.