[greymule]

I wonder about the accuracy of the readings those guns give. At the Iowa state fair many years ago, when I still possessed something resembling an arm, I threw some baseballs into a canvas tarp while a guy "clocked" the speed with a radar gun. The fastest I got was 63 mph. I told the guy he was nuts, since that's about the speed at which the catcher throws the ball back to the pitcher. All he said was, "Well, that's what the gun says." But then he added, "You're still the third-fastest I've had all day. Two pitchers from Iowa State University each hit 64 this morning."

A friend of mine later explained to me that the reading a radar gun gives is the fastest speed at which it clocks the ball times the cosine of the angle of the ball at that moment. Since the ball cannot speed up in the air, the figure produced is the speed of the ball when the gun first picks it up, times the cosine of the angle. Therefore, you have to divide the registered speed by the cosine of the angle to get the true speed.

If the gun is straight on, the registered speed is the true speed (divide by 1.000). If the gun is at a 90 degree angle, the speed will always show as 0 mph. But at, say, a 45 degree angle, a reading of 64 would indicate a true speed of over 90 (divide 64 by 0.7071). The guy with the gun was indeed off to the side, but trying to guess the angle when the gun picked up the ball is pure speculation, and according to my friend, might have changed dramatically depending on how the guy had aimed the gun.

But this was years ago. Maybe the guns have advanced since then and somehow compensate for the angle.

An umpire could always mention to the guy with the gun that police in Connecticut (a state notorious for speed traps) stopped using radar guns after some physicians suggested that the groin cancer an officer suffered might have resulted from his habit of holding the radar gun in his lap between "zaps" of vehicles.