Components of the airfoil.
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http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/211_fall2002.web.dir/Jon_Drobnis/Curveball.html
Posted on 10/14/2010 3:40:23 PM PDT by bunkerhill7
I have caught knuckle ballers and the problem is, that it is as difficult for the catcher to catch as it is for the batter to hit.
In simple terms, a curve is basically vertical (12 to 6 break). a slider is more horizontal and from the same pitcher be about 5 mph faster than a curve. A "slurve" is more or less diagonal, not a true curve and not a true slider but none the less still pretty tough to hit.
I saw a left hand hitter take a real late little hop backward as Rivera threw him the cutter. He actually made solid contact, instead of breaking his bat when the ball ran in on him at the plate. It looks like it jukes left at the last second to me, but just a little bit.
Pedro Martinez in his prime threw something that looked to me to bear left and then hard right. Then there’s the split and the knuckler; if they are illusions then it fools me real good, at least on TV.
Freegards
“But for it to actually “break” would require the ball to suddenly change its rotation somehow”
That’s ridiculous. Wouldn’t require a change in rotation at all. The person commenting about the bowling ball effect had it precisely. The spin can take time to “bite”
Of course Bob Uecker has a famous quote about how to catch the knuckleball, something like “wait ‘till it stops rolling and then go pick it up”.
I saw a few games with Dickey of the Mets against the Nats this year, he’s throwing that thing in the low 80’s sometimes!!
Freegards
I have caught knuckle ballers and the problem is, that it is as difficult for the catcher to catch as it is for the batter to hit.
Air is not a bowling alley.
The less time the ball takes from the pitcher’s release to the catcher’s mitt (or the hitter’s bat), the less the ball sinks toward the Earth.
The distance is 46 feet, the really fast fastballs are travelling over 90 mph. Some are thrown over 100 mph; apropos of this, Nolan Ryan tore a bunch of stuff in his arm on his *second to last pitch*, and threw one more pitch after that.
The height of the mound being regulated, the only differences come from each pitcher’s height and strength. Technique can cause the ball to take a curving path from side to side, but it is always heading downward.
If there’s something *on* the ball, such as spit, K-Y, snot, whatever, the path of the ball can be a little wilder than without, and under the right circumstances could postpone the inevitable drop, or could seem to. Spitters are illegal. Years ago Catfish Hunter did an ad for some soft drink where he used condensation from a cold can of it to throw a demo pitch for some young players. “That’s against the rules.” “Not for me kid, I’m retired.”
I remember watching one of the Niekro brothers getting tossed from a game (and he was “retired” from the game after it) for surreptitiously filing the ball with (if memory serves) an emory board. Roughening the ball on one side can also change the path of the ball; it can increase the effective energy the pitcher can impart to the ball; and because the ball is thrown a bit harder, that also changes the path of the ball. Even if the hitter makes contact, the odds are better than the ball won’t get any distance.
Well, that was fun. :’)
Keep thinking like that and you too could be an environmental scientist!
Disagree! A bowling lane has different oil sections to make the ball "bite" at a certain point down the lane. The air between the pitcher and catcher does not have these varying patterns of resistance.
Even though the pitched baseball slows down as it moves toward the plate, the speed decrease is constant and thus the impact on the curve is also constant. No break.
The effect is apparently similar to how an airplane wing works, in that a difference of air pressure on one side vs another causes the object to move in a particular direction, the one of least resistance.
From Wiki: Airfoil
“The lift on an airfoil is primarily the result of its shape (in particular its camber) and its angle of attack. When either is positive, the resulting flowfield about the airfoil has a higher average velocity on the upper surface than on the lower surface. This velocity difference is necessarily accompanied by a pressure difference, via Bernoulli’s principle for incompressible inviscid flow, which in turn produces the lift force. The lift force can also be related directly to the average top/bottom velocity difference, without invoking the pressure, by using the concept of circulation and the Kutta-Joukowski theorem.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfoil
http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/211_fall2002.web.dir/Jon_Drobnis/Curveball.html
A hard slider has a relatively short "parabolic path".So do some changeups, such as the ones thrown by Sid Fernandez, Frank Viola, and Eric Gagne, to name three with short parabolic paths and murderously-timed breaks that I've seen.
Biggest breaking curve balls I ever saw: Sandy Koufax, Bert Blyleven, Dwight Gooden.
Strangest slider I ever saw: Roger McDowell's, probably because he was primarily a sinkerballer and even his sliders tended to sink as they turned.
Single nastiest curve ball I ever saw thrown: The little curve Sid Fernandez threw in relief in Game Seven, 1986 World Series. Oh, he was bringing the heat (he opened the top of the fifth by literally blowing Jim Rice away on three straight swinging strikes---which may have been equal to pulling the mask off the old Lone Ranger, considering that Rice was, even on his downslide, a first-ball fastball hitter and a deadly one if the fastball was meaty enough; Fernandez relieved Ron Darling in the fourth and ended up with four strikeouts in two and a third innings' relief, before the Mets tied and went ahead in the game), but he dropped strike three in on Spike Owen with a nasty curve ball that didn't even have much of a break---and he threw it so deceptively, with that lunging-forward motion of his, that Owen just had to be thinking the fastball was coming at him . . . and plink! it broke like a floating soap bubble, a real tiny arc, and landed dead center in the zone. Owen probably needed smelling salts when he went back to the dugout to get his glove . . .
Here in Philly we get to see one of the nastiest sliders ever... When Brad Lidge is on, his slider is simply mind boggling. Talk about a short parabolic path!
Here in Philly we get to see one of the nastiest sliders ever... When Brad Lidge is on, his slider is simply mind boggling. Talk about a short parabolic path!Alas, when Brad Lidge isn't on, his slider tends to take a long, parabolic path. In the opposite direction, at distances estimated between 310 and 610 feet, sometimes obstructed by retractable roof girders abutted by fake railroad trains behind grandstands both of which prevent such a slider from landing on the streets of Houston . . . to name just one such . . .
If there’s something *on* the ball, such as spit, K-Y, snot, whatever, the path of the ball can be a little wilder than without, and under the right circumstances could postpone the inevitable drop, or could seem to. Spitters are illegal. Years ago Catfish Hunter did an ad for some soft drink where he used condensation from a cold can of it to throw a demo pitch for some young players. “That’s against the rules.” “Not for me kid, I’m retired.”
Which reminds me that Whitey Ford---who, in his final seasons, used anything from his wedding ring's rasp to his catcher, Elston Howard, scraping it on his shin guard buckles before returning a ball to Ford---once admitted doctoring a ball . . . in an Old-Timer's Game: "I was tired of getting my jock knocked off."
And Gaylord Perry had the routine down so pat that his then-eight year old daughter, asked by a sportswriter what her father really threw, answered without skipping a beat: "It's a hard slider!"
I remember watching one of the Niekro brothers getting tossed from a game (and he was “retired” from the game after it) for surreptitiously filing the ball with (if memory serves) an emory board. Roughening the ball on one side can also change the path of the ball; it can increase the effective energy the pitcher can impart to the ball; and because the ball is thrown a bit harder, that also changes the path of the ball. Even if the hitter makes contact, the odds are better than the ball won’t get any distance.That would have been Joe Niekro.
Bob Uecker told a story on the Niekro brothers at his Hall of Fame induction speech (with Phil sitting right there among the living Hall of Famers): he, Uecker, happened to be catching Phil Niekro the day he started against brother Joe for the first time. "Their parents had seats behind home plate. I saw more of their parents than they did that day."
Best self-defence against being frisked and/or arraigned on the mound: Don Sutton, who liked to tweak umpires by leaving little notes in the fingers of his glove if and when he should be frisked on the mound. The classic such note: YOU'RE GETTING WARMER. BUT IT'S NOT IN HERE, EITHER.
The classic modern-day confrontation between pitching's grand theft felons: Tommy John, then with the Yankees, against Sutton, then with the Angels.
Early in the game, with the Yankees leading 1-0, manager Lou Piniella got a call on the dugout phone . . . from George Steinbrenner, who was watching the game on television from his Tampa home. "Don't you see what Sutton's doing out there?!?" The Boss fumed. "Why aren't you having him checked?"
"George," Piniella replied calmly, "if I have the umpires check Sutton then the Angels'll have the umpires check TJ and maybe both of them get (thumbed). Have you seen the score? Whatever they're doing out there, TJ's doing it better. So let's just leave it alone."
The Boss took the hint. The Yankees went on to win the game. An unknown scout who was visiting the press box when the game ended marveled: "Tommy John against Don Sutton? If anyone can find one smooth ball from that game, he ought to send it to Cooperstown."
Then there was the day in spring training when Mike Flanagan, then with the Baltimore Orioles, drew Thomas Boswell (the great baseball writer for the Washington Post) aside. Flanagan produced a brand-new, untouched baseball. He rubbed it up a little bit. Then, he broke a wire coat hanger apart, and with the jagged end he cut three equal straight gashes right into the meat of the hide.
"Any time I need four new pitches," Flanagan drawled nonchalantly, "I got them."
Once upon a time, a pair of classic wile-guile-and-whatever-they-could-think-of pitchers, Eddie Lopat of the Yankees and Preacher Roe of the Brooklyn Dodgers, squared off in a World Series game. Casey Stengel, knowing both men were pretty crafty at putting things other than their hands on the ball, marveled:
Those two fellas certainly make baseball seem like a simple game. It makes you wonder. You pay these big fellas all this money to swing from their heels. And [Lopat and Roe] come in and give 'em a little o' this and a little o' that and swindle 'em.
Besides the knuckler, they also didn’t look at a good split finger fastball. Those thing drop right off the table up at the plate.
"The split-finger fastball is just a legal spitter . . . Suppose I had my middle finger cut off? I bet you I'd have had one hell of a split-finger fastball."---George Bamberger, former pitching coach and manager, whose own best pitch when he was a minor league pitcher was a spitter he called his Staten Island sinker.
Nice! and LOL! and thanks!
Ha ha, nice.
Freegards
A few years ago my wife and I were hitting ¨Kofax¨ which was the fastest of a group of pitching machines. It heaved it in at about 95 and sometimes you even had to duck out of there.
All of a sudden a voice came down the line exclaiming, ¨Hey, there´s a girl in there!¨
It was one of my proudest baseball moments.
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