Pitches dropping off the table....

Popular Mechanics? isnt that a publication for mechanics ?

I guess also that they never faced Sandy Koufax

Curve balls do drop suddenly.. A combination of ball rotation and gravity. You can actually hear a great curve ball spin and are a strike at thye front of the plate and hit the ground right behind the plate.

TR,

You are probably correct. They most likely never faced Sandy Koufax, but most likely nobody else on this board has either.

Does this make all of us unqualified to talk about hitting a curveball?

Bluetick Hound:
Read "The Physics of Baseball" by Robert K. Adair. You should like Adair, Bluetick. He is the Sterling Professor of Physics at Yale.

A direct quote from Adair's book:
"Does the ball "break" as it nears the plate? Yes."



Seems like George Strait sang a song about Blue.

"Am I Blue? Yes, I'm Blue.
I'm clueless on baseball & physics too..."

Honestly, I dont care what you say. When someone throws me a good 12-6 curve it's clearly dropping off the table.

FO, you can stick a fork in ole' Blue. He's done, too.

quote:

A direct quote from Adair's book:
"Does the ball it nears the plate? Yes."

What's funny is, you don't means..... ...

Here's curve.......

Do any of you fellas remember a few years back when BlueDog and his "supporters" (mostly the same folks with different ids - all emanating from a lunatic bb site) talked about "not seeing what you see."

The good old days - "You arent really seeing what you are seeing"

A troll jamboree baby!!!

luv


What I am saying is if they had faced Koufax they might change their tune

I saw Koufax his entire career and curveball was one of the best I ever saw


What really bugs me is "scientists" who probably never played the game try to explain it

quote:

Originally posted by BlueDog:
Game, I see your old lady let you on the computer early tonight.......Must be payday.....

Nah - Big Ole Mama is with the younger guy at a tournament.

I am just petting the dog (Blue), and listening to the older guy on radio "not seeing what he sees" - or "seeing what he think he sees" - or "seeing what he thought he saw but didnt really see it."

The old Bluetick hound just keeps barking. You have already unquestionably demonstrated the need to learn physics. I truly wish that you would. Then perhaps it would be possible to hold a worthwhile discussion. Until then, there is no use in further wasting bandwidth.


In the words of Elvis:
"You ain't nothing but a hound dawg.
Crying all the time.
You ain't nothin but a hound dawg.
Crying all the time.
You ain't never caught a rabbit..."

TR,

I definetely agree with you on the late break of a curveball. I have played and watched many games and believe it happens. The point of my post wasn't to argue that.

Yoda,


Nice to see you came back from the swamp.....

I see you spent your whole day on the net ....so now its a game of who can cut & paste better huh ?

"The secret to understanding a curveball is the speed of the air moving past the ball's surface. As the ball spins, its top surface moves in the same direction in which the air moves. At the bottom of the ball, the ball's surface and the air move in opposite directions. So the velocity of the air relative to that of the ball's surface is larger on the bottom of the ball.

What difference does that make? The higher velocity difference puts more stress on the air flowing around the bottom of the ball. That stress makes air flowing around the ball "break away" from the ball's surface sooner. Conversely, the air at the top of the spinning ball, subject to less stress due to the lower velocity difference, can "hang onto" the ball's surface longer before breaking away.

As a result, the air flowing over the top of the ball leaves it in a direction pointed a little bit downward rather than straight back. As Newton discovered almost three hundred years ago, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, as the spinning ball throws the air down, the air pushes the ball up in response. A ball thrown with backspin will therefore get a little bit of lift.

A major league curveball can veer as much as 171/2 inches from a straight line by the time it crosses the plate. Over the course of a pitch, the deflection from a straight line increases with distance from the pitcher. So curveballs do most of their curving in the last quarter of their trip. Considering that it takes less time for the ball to travel those last 15 feet (about 1/6 of a second) than it takes for the batter to swing the bat (about 1/5 of a second), hitters must begin their swings before the ball has started to show much curve. No wonder curveballs are so hard to hit.

One important difference between a fastball, a curveball, a slider, and a screwball is the direction in which the ball spins. (Other important factors are the speed of the pitch and rate of spin.) Generally speaking, a ball thrown with a spin will curve in the same direction that the front of the ball (home plate side, when pitched) turns. If the ball is spinning from top to bottom (topspin), it will tend to nosedive into the dirt. If it's spinning from left to right, the pitch will break toward third base. The faster the rate of spin, the more the ball's path curves.
"



Now do you begin to understand that a ball does have late movement ?????

Or once again, would you like to stand up and be a man and tell us all what you have ever done as far playing this game. Your ignorance on every subject you attenpt to discuss is truely mind boggling.

lol....POPULAR MECHANICS.....that good...

Maybe the same article showed you how make a lamp out of your bat!...ops...only baseball people would actually have a bat.

Yoda,

You should really take this act on the road, you could make serious money playing little comedy clubs across the country

NHFundamentals has the physics right. The phenomenon he describes was called,in my physics text anyway, dipole moment. I previously explained the phenomenon to Bluedog in a prior thread about rising fastballs. You can find that thread by searching this site for "dipole moment".

Of course, Bluedog didn't listen then, isn't listening now, just persists in his ignorance, arrogance and condescension.

Sorry Blue, Popular Mechanics is not a recognized authority on physics. Try Scientific American.

By the way, doesn't the new pitch tracking camera and software empirically prove how a ball moves? The job of the theorist is to develop an explanation for what is observed as a practical matter to be true. If your theory doesn't explain what is empirically observed, your theory is ****. To say reality is wrong because it doesn't match your theory is ignorant, arrogant and marks you as a moron.

Well Yoda,

Heading out on vacation early in the morn...So...Please do not spend all your time in the next few days running google & yahoo searches to try to back up what you dont understand. Looks like it took you about 2 weeks to find a couple of URLs.....hell, my kid could do better than that when he was in 3rd grade.


I am STILL waiting for you to give us any insight into where you teach and who you teach all this sewerage to. Anyone who really wanted to be open and honest with people would have done that a long time ago.


I have recieved from dozens of PM from members here telling me all about you. Im just not good at following their advice to just ignore you......lol.

Yoda,

AS USUAL....YOUR WRONG AGAIN......

http://www.exploratorium.edu/baseball/curve.html

Yoda,

In case you missed it in all your google and Ask Jeeves "Research"....

The net has copies and crosslinks all over it.


By the way, how is that lamp coming along ?