[greymule]

Remember also that the gun has to be straight on. If it's hitting the pitch at an angle, it will register lower. You have to divide your reading by the cosine of the angle to get the true speed. If you're 10 degrees off on a 90 mph pitch, the true speed is actually 91.4; at 20 degrees off 90 = 95.78. If the gun is 90 degrees off, all pitches register 0. A chip can be programmed to do practically anything, so maybe some guns are designed to take the angle into account.

At the Iowa State Fair 25 years ago (when I still had an arm), I threw as hard as I could at a booth where a guy was holding a radar gun. I kept registering 63 and told the guy that was impossible—63 is the speed of a throw from the catcher to the pitcher.

All this guy could say was, "That's the reading." However, when I asked him the highest reading he had clocked that day, he said it was 64, by two Iowa State University pitchers. (I doubt that their coach would have approved.) So I assumed his gun was faulty until I learned that the angle was critical. The guy manning the booth was sitting in a deck chair well off to the side.