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The fluid dynamics of baseball pitches

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bartonlsmith

What is PIV? Post #6

Posted on November 25, 2018June 21, 2019 by bartonlsmith

Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is our main measurement technique.  It uses two laser sheet pulses to illuminate a slice of a flow.  We add particles to the flow (theater fog, in our case), and the laser pulses illuminate these particles. Think of the lasers as a camera flash, but only Continue Reading

Posted In General

Effect of Seams on the Boundary Layer Post #5

Posted on November 25, 2018June 21, 2019 by bartonlsmith

Our preliminary study using high-seamed Wilson 1030 baseballs and a brutal 3-wheel machine.  These results were presented at the 2018 APS DFD meeting. These results are based on velocity measurements in the air using PIV. All of these data sets were acquired in a vertical plane. We start with a smooth Continue Reading

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Do seams affect trajectory?Post #4

Posted on November 25, 2018November 30, 2020 by bartonlsmith

11/29/2020. I will leave the original post unchanged below, but some of our claims here proved to me untrue, or at least more nuanced than we realized. Were I to write this today, I’d point out that seams don’t matter most of the time when the ball has no gyro Continue Reading

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Attempt using a machine Post #3

Posted on November 25, 2018December 1, 2019 by bartonlsmith

The point here is that, when spinning on the same axis and no gyro, there is no difference between a 2-seam and 4-seam pitch.

Posted In Seam-Shifted Wakes

Why am I interested in Baseball Drag? Post #2

Posted on November 24, 2018June 21, 2019 by bartonlsmith

In 2015, the number of home runs increased over 2014 by an amount larger than one would expect from year to year fluctuations. In 2016, MLB experienced a similar increase In 2017, the number of home runs increased again.  Many fans believed that the increase was due to a deliberate Continue Reading

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Previous study of 2 vs 4 seam pitches Post #1

Posted on November 23, 2018June 21, 2019 by bartonlsmith

RPP tackled the same question (why 2 and 4-seam fastballs are different) back in July and came to the same conclusion (that seam orientation in itself does nothing) but from the opposite direction.  They showed that a 4-seam pitch with side-spin induced at release would run the same way as Continue Reading

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