Very interesting numbers, calculator, and the best making a real game throw. This is the exception, every one wants to make the standard. This was quite a throw at a "clutch" time.
Larry Granillo
In case you had forgotten, Yadier Molina is an absolutely fantastic defensive catcher. As a reminder, please watch this video of Molina gunning down Dee Gordon on a stolen base attempt with maybe the best throw to second you have ever seen.
Did you watch it? Have you picked up your jaw yet? Good.
Dee Gordon is one of the fastest men in baseball and he got himself a good jump against Edward Mujica. He had no chance, though, as Molina caught the ball, stood up and fired a strike to Skip Schumaker in less time than it took for me to pour a glass of orange juice this morning.
In case you were wondering how fast Molina had to throw that ball in order to nail the speedy Gordon, I did the math asked some smart guys to do the math for me. Watching the video, I timed the throw from Molina-to-Schumaker at roughly 1.2 seconds. Over 127 feet (the distance from home to second base), that's an average speed of 72 mph. Thrown balls slow down while traveling through the air, though, so the average speed doesn't tell us how fast the ball actually was traveling out of Molina's hand.
According to the all-knowing Mike Fast (along with a little help from this very nifty Trajectory Calculator from Alan Nathan), the ball must have left Molina's hand with an initial velocity of 83 mph (and arrived at Schumaker's glove traveling 63 mph) in order to travel that distance so quickly.
That may not sound that impressive to those of us used to hearing about 95 mph fastballs, but Molina is a catcher crouching behind home plate, not a pitcher on an elevated mound who gets to go through his full wind-up. Molina had to catch the ball, grip the ball, stand up, change his body position, and throw a perfect strike to a blind target all with the pressure of a moving Gordon on the bases (and while wearing pads and a mask). A nearly-instantaneous, no-wind-up 83 mph throw is terrific.
So, yes, Yadier Molina is fantastic. Please remember this."
http://www.baseballprospectus.....php?articleid=18349
It averaged 72 mph glove to glove, and that means it had a time of ... 1.2 seconds. That is whole other universe from what Matheny was talking about above. There is a reason. It's likely that Matheny is using pop time as literally the moment the ball pops! into Molina's glove to when it pops! into the middle infielder's glove. What Granillo clocked is release-to-pop. The time it took Molina to uncoil from his crouch to make the throw is subtracted from Granillo's measurement because that would tell us nothing, of course, about the velocity of Molina's throw. The bet here is that Molina -- 1.2 seconds from hand or 1.7 seconds from pop to pop -- made the fastest throw last night of any catcher in the majors yet this year.
http://www.stltoday.com/sports...c1-0019bb30f31a.html
Video of throw here...
http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play....id=24751585&c_id=mlb
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