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Science and Baseball Pitching To the Editor of the Scientific American: A thing greatly to be desired is a testing place for baseball curves. I suppose the best place would be on the premises of one of the league grounds; handy' for leading pitchers in turn from all parts of the country, as' well as for local men; but conducted by residents, e. g., a few men in turn appointed by the scientific or athletic department, or both, of some nearby college or association. The apparatus would be cheap--a few small screens for right and left curves. Up and down deviations, if gone into, would require something more. Here could be carried on for a considerable length of time (as desirable) an accumulating, confirming series of tests; e. g., as to how often, relatively, balls curve out of the plane of the parabola ; if it is caused only by twirling the ball; if it can be done at will; or how frequently; by what pitchers or class of pitchers; which revolutions, right or left, produce which curves, etc. The accumulated and reliable data would be of great practical use to pitchers (as we shall notice further) and to science. Better find out just what really happens, and how much, before trying to explain how or why it happens. There seems to be an almost universal belief in the wide use of in and out, up and down shoots, fadeaways, floating corkscrews, etc. The scientific mind naturally asks (1) why this large belief in this large performance; (2) what cause there may be for some curvature. These are not necessarily the same question. There was some advantage in the old-fashioned college curriculum, including, e. g., something of both psychology and physics. In all the published discussions that I have seen it seems to be taken for a settled fact that all this throwing of wide curves is going on all over the country, and that it is up to the material scientists alone to explain it all. Psychology suggests, e. g., how much of what most people believe is from hearsay. How many out of tens of thousands get squarely in front of pitched balls and try to see if there are lateral curves? In a case like this the opinion of the great majority is utterly worthless. Next, of those who have carefully tried to see, how many know the absolute requirements; that you must get the catcher out of the way and have your eye exactly in the plane of the parabola to see whether the ball goes out of that plane. And how is any human being going to know just where that invisible plane is going to be? So much for those who simply say, I have seen it. As an approximate test of appearance, I stretched a fine wire about sixty feet long. On it I hung a baseball by a sliding ring. To the ring I attached a small fish line, and arranged weight and pulleys so that when released the line would draw the ball swiftly to the other end of the wire. If I placed my eye at the wire, of course the ball would seem to come straight all the way. But if I was a little away from the wire, the ball would seem to come straight toward me at first (so sharp the angle of deviation) and then to swerve. off quickly toward the last. This, I repeat, was only a test in appearance. The curve of the falling ball would complicate it more. Optical illusion is more common than many imagine. Everybody used to believe the sun rose and set, because they saw it. They killed Bruno for denying it. Some insult people now for doubting what they saw. Animal painters always thought that horses ran in a certain way till the kinetoscope proved them entirely mistaken. In moving pictures (founded on optical illusion) there is a special illustration of curves, viz.: If there is represented something coming from a distance toward the spectator, say a railway train, it will seem to come straight toward you, or almost so, and just as it passes, to curve or swerve off to the side in a most astonishing way. But we know there could be no such curve in the railway track. Suppose your eye is half a foot off the parabola. The ball in coming ten feet deviates only about an inch from your plane, so sharp is the angle, and in half a second it whisks by you half a foot to the right or left. Of course, it seems to curve, especially at the end of the flight. So much as to the they say and the I saw and the psychology. What influences more educated and even skeptical minds is that writers in leading magazines refer to those curves as settled by experiment. From these and from articles that I could obtain on the subject, about all that I could learn was that a long time ago the experiment was tried with two posts, that about forty years ago it was done at Yale; thirty years ago a prominent pitcher, on the eleventh attempt, pitched a ball that went on the west side of a 2-inch stake, on the .east side of a 5-inch fruit tree, and on the west side of an inch rake shaft; and one, I think, with better apparatus, somewhere in Ohio. These experiments should not be denied or underrated. They aimed to see that a certain thing could be done. But they are not scientific proof of all the curve pitching that the masses talk about. I would say, by the way, that less than three posts can prove nothing, and posts, trees, and sticks leave some room for doubt. I used three screens. I may add that I did not succeed in pitching any curves. However, I had to move away soon. I left the screens on the grounds, but never heard of anyone succeeding, although there were some wonderful curve pitchers about. With all the talk and print about curve pitching all over the country by amateurs as well as professionals (the wonderful shoots, jumps, etc.), one would think what a skillful science and practice it must be by the great league pitchers. (Of course those men are not responsible for what is said about them.) But what do we find? Mr. Irwin said the great professional pitchers he consulted did not pretend to know the theory of curves. One thought of trying to see if he could pitch curves purposely as he wished. This is the great age of science, and baseball is an obsession of this country, and still all this curving is asserted and denied. As to explanations, so far: We know that a sud-dent gust of wind coming at the eleventh or other time will deviate a ball some. But that is not frequent enough to confuse a series of tests, or could be guarded against. Mr. Irwin and the professors seemed to see the inadequacy of the twirling theory, and they threshed out in vain the falling of various bodies through mediums of various densities (reported in Collier's Weekly). I would suggest the fact that all bodies falling through a medium near their own density are liable to deviate, as a feather or ping-pong ball in the air, or a billiard ball or marble in water when it gets down where the water is nearer the density of the ball. But the air is nothing like so dense as a baseball. And we know that the thrown baseball does not slow up like those falling balls. The theory of air compression was discarded. Can we suppose that if projected balls were given to unaccountable deviations gun practice would be so reliable and accurate as it is? The revolving of a ball on its course causes deviation. But how much? A rifle ball is revolved on a plane perpendicular to the course to keep it straight. We will only note here that it requires a tremendous explosive force to do it. A cricket ball is not pitched as fast as a baseball, and a little twirl when it strikes the ground will deviate the rebound some. A tennis ball is smaller, has a frictional surface (purposely ), and the racket has a broad and very rough face, so that by a slanting, grinding blow the ball can be made to revolve with great rapidity, and the grind on the ground will give a greater deviation still. A golf ball is small, trenched or corrugated, and when hammered with a hard club, so much heavier than itself, with a slanting stroke, will spin and curve considerably in its long flights. The wind also has quite a chance at it, too. The billiard ball receives a shot-like, longitudinal impact from the cue and twirls on the frictional cloth, and being heavy, retains its motion the longer. A baseball hammered by a bat on one side, that is, a heavily batted foul, will spin considerably. Now, a baseball has no ground or cloth table-cover to spin against. And to compare its revolutions in the air with those other balls we will have to imagine a baseball fired from a rifled cannon, or hammered by a golf club several times its weight, wielded by a giant, and allowed to soar a long distance ; or by a giant tennis racket, etc. It would require a human hand of steel, swivel wrist, and explogive revolution ; a kind of double million magnifying glass gyroscope, as Sam Weller might say. But anyone can get some idea of what a hand can do in revolving a baseball. Color part of a ball, so as to see better, and let watchers stand near the line along which the twirler pitches the ball. Anyhow, if it spins rapidly it will-not always stop on striking the ground, and some of its spinning will be seen. Then there is the handicap of making it revolve to the right or left, up or down, and all in addition to the strain of control and speed, without which the best pitcher will be batted all over the grounds. A practical question is, is it wise for a pitcher to additionally strain and distract himself by that which is not yet systematically tried out and reported? And, by fuller facts, theories of explanation ought to be helped. One of these is that friction of the air on the side of the ball revolving forward is greater than on the side revolving backward, and acts as a brake to swerve the ball to the forward revolving side. I knew the head of a high school who held this theory, but taught the pitchers to twist the nose of the ball in the direction he wanted it to curve. The Bernouilli theory is that the side of the greatest velocity is the side of the least pressure from without. Is not the side of the greatest velocity the side of the ball that is revolving forward in the direction of the ball's flight? And is not the side revolving backward the side where the air goes by the ball less rapidly, the side of the greatest pressure from without? According to the theory, the ball would be ' pushed to the side revolving forward, the side of less pressure. But Prof. Franklin seems to me to draw the opposite conclusion. Suppose a pitched ball is revolving nose to the left. Pressure and purchase being greater in front than behind, it would seem that the ball would claw or work itself to the right. Also, the right being the side of greatest velocity, least pressure, the ball would tend to the right, by the Bernouilli theory. These forces might be true and yet overbalanced by a third and greater force, which we may call the wedge. The surface of the ' revolving ball on the left front quarter is by friction sweeping the air out of the way and backward, while on the right front quarter it is sweeping the surface air inward and forward against the oncoming air, so that the greater resistance pressure on that quarter wedges the ball over to the left. As a ship moves forward, if there is a little more floating ice on one bow it will tend to wedge the bow over to the other side. I repeat for emphasis (1) most of what we believe is from hearsay ; (2) that those who only say I have seen it should consider that, for one to see and know the curves in question, he would have to know just where the plane of the parabola is and have his eye there; (3) optical illusion is more common than the unscientific imagine and seems to have been ignored in this discussion; (4) a testing place, carried on for a reasonable time, would be a benefit to players acid science. S. C. Thompson. Ocoee, Fla.
