Rising fastball

[greymule]

During the most recent of our raging debates about whether a pitcher can throw a rising fastball, I mentioned that perhaps a friend of mine, a professor of aeronautical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, might be able to supply some useful input. I saw him last night and broached the subject, and I thought his response quite interesting.

My friend, Professor Richard Miles, says that the recently deceased George Reynolds, a well-known professor of physics at Princeton who spent much of his career studying sources of light at the bottom of the ocean—and loved baseball—investigated the physics of the game in several areas and was particularly intrigued by the question of the rising fastball. After much analysis, Reynolds eventually concluded that a human being cannot throw a rising fastball.

However, Reynolds did not arrive at his determinination easily. The physics of objects traveling through any medium (water, air, oil) is extremely complicated, and even with round balls, whether smooth, seamed, or pitted like golf balls, equations from books are insufficient. In such cases, experimentation is required, and after the behavior of the ball is observed, the scientists can look to the equations to figure out why. (He gave the example of golf balls, where everyone originally assumed that a smooth ball would travel farther until the players themselves noticed that old, nicked balls outperformed the new ones.) I wish I could relate exactly what my friend told me, but he placed great emphasis on the air flow behind and around the ball, repeatedly mentioning "attached" versus "detached" air flow and cautioning that a ball might travel predictably up to a certain speed but behave drastically differently beyond that point.

He said that the best way to determine whether a fastball can rise would be to study films. Interestingly, on Miles's living room wall is the series of photographs (the originals) that settled a "raging" sports debate of long ago: whether a race horse's hooves are ever all off the ground at once.

I'm sure that any errors in the above are mine, not Professor Miles's.

One other item of interest: Reynolds did a lot of study of breaking balls and knuckle balls, why and how they break when they do, what the limits are, etc. Anyway, he concluded that human pitchers were just short of the ability to throw balls that broke far more. In other words, if pitchers could get just a little more spin on the ball, the break would be significantly greater.