Rising fastball

[NIump50]

Originally Posted by gsf23

My cousin could throw a mean rise-ball. It started out a little below the knees and was about shoulder height when it got to the plate.

Of course this was whiffle-ball.

“The good rising fastball is the best pitch in baseball.”
Tom Seaver

Ted Breitenstein, a .500 pitcher for the Cardinals and Reds through the 1890s, threw a rising fastball. Nig Cuppy, a minor star with the Cleveland Spiders, threw what he called a "jump ball"-a rising fastball.
excerpt from "The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers"

In the Dead Ball Era (1903-1919), a "hopping" fast ball was prized, because it led to strikeouts, pop ups, and fly balls, which were generally not dangerous in that era. In the lively ball era (beginning in 1920), the "sinking" fast ball was more prized, because it kept the ball in the infield, and kept down the number of home runs. excerpt from "The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers"

However, while some pitchers could make a ball hop and some people could make a ball "sink," there is no evidence of any major-league pitcher, before 1950, doing both, or switching between one and the other (Satchel Paige threw two distinct fastballs in the 1930s, when he pitched in the Negro Leagues.excerpt from "The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers"

"My fastball had a natural sink to it," they would say, or "My fastball had a pretty good hop to it," or "I had pretty good speed, but my fastball was straight, so I had to keep it away from the middle of the plate."
excerpt from "The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers"

Nick Cuppy expressed this idea succinctly in 1908, in a book called How to Pitch (John Foster). "That there is such a thing as a jump ball I believe is universally conceded," said Cuppy, "but like other pitchers I am in the dark as to its cause. I am positive that it exists, for I have been able to get it myself." Forty years later, there is little evidence of much better understanding.excerpt from "The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers"

Fergie Jenkins emerged as a star in 1967, throwing a rising fastball to right-handersexcerpt from "The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers"

My thinking was just to go up there and be aggressive, to swing at strikes," Lankford said. "The first pitch was away. But the second was a strike and I was able to drive it out of the ballpark. He has that rising fastball.
CNNSI.com Sept. 2 2001

Facing Johnson's the best challenge that you're going to have in this league. The scary thing about him right now is that he's becoming a better pitcher," said Chicago second baseman Eric Young. "Now he's mixing in a two-seamer with his rising fastball, so you can't even sit on any particular type of fastball. Just adding that one pitch sometimes makes him unhittable."
CNNSI April 30, 2000

I have 2 things to say:

1. If professional batters, pitchers and catchers from different eras are saying the ball is rising I tend to believe it.
As umpires we are always chastising fans, players and coaches for arguing calls from the stands and dugout. Our #1 response either to them or between ourselsves is generally 'how can they know better than us, we had the best angle and vantage point'.
Well, who has the better vantage point on a fastball than a pitcher, catcher and batter? Let's stay consistent with our arguments.

2. One of the most consistent arguments I've heard against the apparent rising fastball is that it doesn't drop as much as a slower fastball therefore giving the illusion of rising.

This explanation comes from an article by Lee Bowman,
Scripps Howard News Service
Terry Bahill, a professor of systems and industrial engineering at the University of Arizona, divides the batting process into thirds --sensory gathering, computing and swinging -- and agrees with Nathan that hitters use mental models of pitching.
He explains that pitchers keep earned-run averages low by trying to confuse those mental models, and uses the myth of the "jumping" or rising fastball to illustrate.
A pitcher will throw several 90-mph fastballs, and the batter develops a mental model and reaction to this speed. Then, the pitcher slips in a 95-mph toss, which looks the same to the batter at the sensory-gathering stage, and he swings for the same spot. But because the ball is actually moving faster, it doesn't drop quite as much as the earlier pitches.

If this were true then why, when a pitcher is consistently throwing 80mph fastballs and then muscles up one at 85mph doesn't it look like a riser?
In fact it should "jump" even higher since the % of increase in speed is even greater than one going from 90 to 95mph.
I've never heard anyone accuse an 85mph fastball of rising.
The logic doesn't work.

Besides the virulent and malicious posts that are forthcoming because I do not subscribe to the pack mentality I really want to hear from someone that can show the flaw in my logic. The illusion theory isn't working for me.

[SanDiegoSteve]

Fastpitch softball pitchers throw balls that rise as they approach the plate, as the spin on these pitches is opposite that of an overhand release, as well as the launch angle and trajectory. That is why they call the pitch a "riser."

[briancurtin]

Originally Posted by NIump50

1. If professional batters, pitchers and catchers from different eras are saying the ball is rising I tend to believe it.
As umpires we are always chastising fans, players and coaches for arguing calls from the stands and dugout. Our #1 response either to them or between ourselsves is generally 'how can they know better than us, we had the best angle and vantage point'.
Well, who has the better vantage point on a fastball than a pitcher, catcher and batter? Let's stay consistent with our arguments.

i cant speak for everyone else, but im not looking at the "rising fastball" issue as an umpire. im looking at it as a former player (catcher), former physics student, and just a general schmuck off the street. ive also looked at it from a pitcher's perspective from the time i spent in the bullpen or at practice with my college pitching coaches, as well as with my world series ring owing HS pitching coach. i havent taken the perspective that "im the umpire, i know it all"

[gotblue?]

Originally Posted by SanDiegoSteve

Fastpitch softball pitchers throw balls that rise as they approach the plate, as the spin on these pitches is opposite that of an overhand release, as well as the launch angle and trajectory. That is why they call the pitch a "riser."

Steve, I believe that the spin on a "riser" in softball is in the same direction as, and not the opposite of, that of a fastball thrown with an overhand motion.

[NIump50]

Originally Posted by briancurtin

i cant speak for everyone else, but im not looking at the "rising fastball" issue as an umpire. im looking at it as a former player (catcher), former physics student, and just a general schmuck off the street. ive also looked at it from a pitcher's perspective from the time i spent in the bullpen or at practice with my college pitching coaches, as well as with my world series ring owing HS pitching coach. i havent taken the perspective that "im the umpire, i know it all"

Brian
Usually quotation marks are used to indicate a direct quote and since you're referring to my post i have to assume you're trying to attribute that quote to me. I'd appreciate it if you corrected your mistake.
Not only did you purposely misquote but you also, purposely or not, misunderstood the the reference to umpires in my my post.
I can appreciate you and your coaches perspective on this issue, I was only giving the perspective of proven and respected players like Tom Seaver, Fergie Jenkins, Ray Lankford and others.
If I was going to get a perspective on golf, I'd be better advised listening to Tiger Woods than my high school health teacher/golf coach.

PS
The organist for the White Sox received a world series ring. Maybe she can give us a definitive answer to the question.

[briancurtin]

i may have misunderstood the reference, but i attributed nothing to you so i dont see the need to change anything.

i dont know about you, but id take the advice of a pitcher who won a game in the world series with the twins, even though hes a gym teacher now and works with the baseball team on the side.

[BigUmp56]

Originally Posted by NIump50

Brian
I can appreciate you and your coaches perspective on this issue, I was only giving the perspective of proven and respected players like Tom Seaver, Fergie Jenkins, Ray Lankford and others.

I agree. If baseball players say that a pitched ball can defy the laws of physics it must be true.


Tim.

[Justme]

Originally Posted by BigUmp56

I agree. If baseball players say that a pitched ball can defy the laws of physics it must be true.


Tim.

Of course it’s true……

Did I ever tell you about the time I was abducted by aliens? The light lifted me up inside their trans-dimensional star cruiser and ………………………

[SanDiegoSteve]

Originally Posted by gotblue?

Steve, I believe that the spin on a "riser" in softball is in the same direction as, and not the opposite of, that of a fastball thrown with an overhand motion.

Okay, I'll give you that one, but the launch angle and trajetory are quite different, unless you have a Kent Tekulve type pitcher.

[nickrego]

Originally Posted by SanDiegoSteve

Okay, I'll give you that one, but the launch angle and trajetory are quite different, unless you have a Kent Tekulve type pitcher.

Originally Posted by gotblue?

Steve, I believe that the spin on a "riser" in softball is in the same direction as, and not the opposite of, that of a fastball thrown with an overhand motion.

Not being a softball person, I'd really be interested in how you throw a softball underhand, with any velocity, and get backspin on it, as with an overhand thrown fastball. If you did, it would work against making the ball rise, but since the ball is being thrown in a upward direction from the start, the spin is overcome by inertia. And a rising Softball is not the same thing as a rising Fastball, which is thrown downward, and then rises.

[NIump50]

Originally Posted by briancurtin

i may have misunderstood the reference, but i attributed nothing to you so i dont see the need to change anything.

i dont know about you, but id take the advice of a pitcher who won a game in the world series with the twins, even though hes a gym teacher now and works with the baseball team on the side.

So who exactly were you quoting?



When it comes to pitching and how the ball reacts this gym teacher has more or less credibility than Tom Seaver?

Here's an interesting piece:


Every sport is governed by the laws of physics, of course. However, Paul Doherty, senior scientist at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, argues that baseball is a special case......
For example, serious scientific studies have been done on the technique outfielders use to track and catch a fly ball. Another study determined that the “rising fastball” was an optical illusion, based on a batter’s perception of pitching speeds.
And what other sport ever had an official physicist? Yale Professor Robert K. Adair filled that post for the National League from 1987 to 1989, at the request of the late baseball executive (and one-time Yale president) Bart Giamatti.
“I like to point out that Einstein, if he were interested in baseball, still could not from first principles calculate the flight of the ball,” Adair said. “We know the basic rules, but we can’t solve the equations.”

A myriad of mysteries
The unpredictability of a baseball - and the prowess of a pitcher - has much to do with the 216 raised red cotton stitches encircling its cowhide surface.
Excerpt from an article by Alan Boyle

I'm no physicist so correct me if I'm wrong, what I'm reading is movement on a baseball is unpredictable and even Einstein could not predict through physics the movement of the ball, yet we know it won't rise but don't ask us to prove it.
Short of definitive scientific proof to the contrary, I don't think defaulting to the accounts and experiences of respected professionals personally involved is such a reach.
I do enjoy all the sarcasm around this subject, but I haven't seen anyone tackle the question of why an 85mph fastball never 'appears' to be rising.

I'm also quite sure that the once official physicist of the national league, Robert Adair, is not the right person to be sourcing any info from but I couldn't find any appropriate quotes or studies from high school gym teachers.

[Carbide Keyman]

MAKE IT STOP,

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD,

MAKE

IT

STOP !

Doug

[NFump]

Originally Posted by nickrego

Not being a softball person, I'd really be interested in how you throw a softball underhand, with any velocity, and get backspin on it, as with an overhand thrown fastball. If you did, it would work against making the ball rise, but since the ball is being thrown in a upward direction from the start, the spin is overcome by inertia. And a rising Softball is not the same thing as a rising Fastball, which is thrown downward, and then rises.

The same way you get topspin on a curveball thrown overhand.(Think about it). And no it wouldn't work against making it rise. And yes the theory is the same for both the "rise" and the rising fastball.

[BigUmp56]

I had to condense this into two posts.


From LiveScience:


Busting Baseball Myths: Scientist Throws Big Curveballs
By Bjorn Carey
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 20 April 2006
09:06 am ET


Your Little League coach probably didn't know it, but every time he sent you to the plate with the instructions "keep your eye on the ball," he was giving you an impossible task.

And if you followed the coach's advice of positioning yourself directly under a popup, you probably struggled to catch balls in the outfield, too.

Ken Fuld, a baseball enthusiast and visual psychophysicist at the University of New Hampshire, has pored over numerous baseball studies and suggests that neither of these approaches produce optimal results.

Instead, much to your coach’s chagrin, you should try mimicking the quirks of the best Major League players.

Major League heat

At the Major League level, pitchers sling fastballs between 90 and 100 mph and sometimes a tweak faster. The ball moves far too swiftly for a batter to watch for its entire journey to home plate.

"In the last few feet before the plate, the ball reaches an angular velocity that exceeds the ability of the eye to track the ball," Fuld told LiveScience. "The best hitters can track the ball to within 5 or 6 feet of the plate."

Sometimes players will abandon eye contact mid-way through the pitch and move their line of sight to where they anticipate the ball will cross the plate. Batters often "take" the first couple pitches of an "at bat" in this manner to try and calibrate the movement and speed of a pitcher's offerings.

Killer curve

But a hitter is at the mercy of what the pitch does in those last few feet. That's when their eyes have left the ball and a nasty 12-to-6 curveball—a pitch named after the face of a clock and which drops top to bottom—can make even the best hitters swing out of their shoes. The pitch looks innocent enough, but during the instant the hitter is blind to the ball, a good curveball will have dropped a foot or more, and the batter will likely swing over the pitch.


Because of its straight trajectory, many hitters have an easier time hitting a four-seam, 100-mph fastball than a lively curveball. Forkballs, sinkers, and split-fingered fastballs, all of which have tough-to-judge spin and dart around the strike zone, are similarly tough to hit.

On the flipside are knuckleballs. Even though they're slow-moving and have little to no spin, they flutter erratically, making them one of the most difficult pitches to connect with. As legendary hitting coach Charlie Lau once said, "There are two theories on hitting a knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works."

The myth of the rising fastball

Fuld has pondered other aspects of hitting that will interest any fan.

When a hitter swings under the ball and misses, baseball announcers sometimes say the pitcher got him with a "rising fastball." But technically, this pitch cannot exist if thrown overhand—it's impossible for a pitch thrown downward to buck gravity and achieve upward lift.

The rising fastball deceives the hitter in almost the opposite way a good curve does. A 90-mph fastball will drop significantly less than one thrown at 80 mph. So instead of dropping a few inches in the last few feet, a fastball with some serious zip will maintain a nearly straight trajectory.

"If he thinks it's an 80-mph fastball, but it's really 90 mph, since it didn't drop it will appear to rise in that last instant," Fuld said. "It looks like it hops up, and that's the illusion of a rising fastball."



Tim.

[BigUmp56]

From the Wikepedia:


The fastball is the most common type of pitch in baseball. Some "power" pitchers, like Randy Johnson and Billy Wagner, can throw it 95-100 mph (150-160 km/h), and rely on this speed to prevent the ball from being hit. Others throw more slowly but put movement on the ball or throw it on the outside of the plate where the batter cannot easily reach it. The effect of a faster pitch can sometimes be achieved by minimizing the batter's vision of the ball before its release. The result is known as an "exploding fastball": a pitch that seems to arrive at the plate quickly despite its low velocity. Fastballs are usually thrown with backspin, so that the Magnus effect creates an upward force on the ball, causing it to fall less rapidly than might be expected. A pitch on which this effect is most marked is often called a "rising fastball", as the ball appears to rise to the batter. Colloquially, use of the fastball is called throwing heat or putting steam on it, among many other variants.



From Popular Mechanics:




The Myth Of The Rising Fastball

Years ago, baseball players and fans commonly believed that it was possible to throw a rising fastball--a pitch that would curve upward or hop as it approached the batter. This could be done, it was thought, by gripping the baseball across the seams and releasing the pitch with a wrist snap that would impart a pronounced backspin on the ball. Although they could not explain why it happened, pitchers, batters and catchers were convinced that if the pitch were thrown at high speed--over 90 mph--it would rise as it crossed the plate, causing the batter to misjudge the trajectory and swing under the ball. They were certain the ball rose because they could see it rise.

As a longtime baseball fan and a physicist specializing in the physics of sports, I was curious to find out whether the rising fastball was for real. After all, a baseball must obey the laws of physics, and there was a well-established theory and sufficient data available to allow me to calculate the aerodynamic forces on a baseball in flight. The basic principles are relatively simple. After the ball leaves the pitcher's hand, it is subject to just three forces: gravity (equal to the weight of the ball) pulling it vertically downward; aerodynamic drag, created by the collision of the ball with the surrounding air, which reduces its forward speed; and what is known as the Magnus force, generated by the interaction of the spinning surface of the ball with the air. The ball generates a low-pressure wake behind it as it moves through the air, but if the surface is spinning, the wake is deflected sideways. According to Newton's law of action and reaction, if the ball deflects the air to one side, the air will push the ball in the opposite direction. The Magnus force always acts perpendicular to the path of the ball, deflecting it sideways according to the direction of spin. It is this force that allows pitchers to throw a repertoire of breaking balls--curveballs, sliders, sinkers, etc.--by adjusting the rate and direction of the spin on the ball along with the speed and location of the pitch. To throw a rising fastball, the Magnus force must be directed upward, opposing the pull of gravity, and this can be achieved by throwing the ball with backspin. If the Magnus force is greater than the weight of the ball, then the net force on the ball will cause it to rise.

When I ran computer simulations of pitches, I made some interesting discoveries. I learned that over the standard pitching distance of 60 ft. 6 in., a ball loses about 9 percent of its initial speed due to aerodynamic drag--thus a pitch launched at 90 mph will have slowed to 81 mph when it reaches the batter. The pitch takes only about 0.44 second to cover the distance. During this interval the ball falls about 3 ft. due to the pull of gravity. A batter has less than half a second to judge the trajectory of the ball, decide whether to swing, and then bring his bat around to the projected point of contact. Hitting a baseball at the major league level, I discovered, is a truly remarkable feat.

Most significantly, I discovered that in order for the ball to truly rise in flight--for the Magnus force to exceed the weight of the ball--the pitch would have to be launched with a backspin of more than 3600 rpm. This is far beyond the capacity of any major league pitcher. High-speed photography shows that spin rates of about 1800 rpm are the best that can be achieved. Thus, it is not humanly possible to throw a true rising fastball. With the ball spinning at 1800 rpm and traveling at 90 mph, the Magnus force retards the vertical drop by a little more than a foot. Instead of dropping 3 ft. vertically on its way to the plate, the ball drops slightly less than 2 ft. I concluded that the rising fastball is an optical illusion. The ball appears to rise only because it doesn't fall as much as the batter expects it to--in other words, the ball rises only in relation to the batter's expectations.

Over time, a number of other scientists have verified my results. The most convincing confirmation has come from real-time tracking of baseball pitches using multiple video cameras and rapid computerized reconstruction of the trajectories. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever recorded a fastball rising as it crosses the plate. A Google search on the term "rising fastball" reveals dozens of articles all attesting to the fact that the rising fastball is an optical illusion. To the exquisitely trained eyes of a top-flight batter or catcher, the ball appears to rise because it does not fall as much as it would without the backspin.

--Peter J. Brancazio
Professor Emeritus of Physics
Brooklyn College, The City University of New York



You can see for yourself that it's impossible for a pitched baseball to rise by doing a simulation at this link. All of the advanced calculations are done for you. However feel free to input as many relevant variables as you'd like.


http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~nterrell...eport.html#use


In the past four months as this debate has raged I've done mathematical calculations myself to prove the impossibility of a baseball thrown overhand rising, posted studies by noted physicists and image physiologists. Yet for some reason I can only attribute to stubborness there are at least two of you who feel you know better. This will hopefully be my last post on this subject. Feel free to believe what ever science fiction you want to. The fact is, and I do mean fact, that it's impossible for a baseball thrown overhand to escape it's initial velocity vector.



Tim.