Our high school owns a Hack Attack pitching machine. These machines have 3 solid wheels. We own the huge one that can do nearly anything. BUT, when you are operating it, any adjustment to the knobs alters RPM and velo at the same time, and often in the opposite way Continue Reading
General
Things that don’t neatly fit into the other topics
Post 72b: Separation upstream of a seam.
In post 72, I presented the map below (this post won’t make a lot of sense if you haven’t read that). This post will be about the blue region. A seam in this region (roughly from -10º to -28º) can sometimes cause laminar separation farther forward. The average location is Continue Reading
Training Kids with Smart Baseballs: Post 71
Say you are the parent of a 14 year old pitcher and you want to explore the world of pitch design. You have seen the “smart baseball” ads and are curious about them, but what could you do with that information if you had it? I’m glad you asked. First Continue Reading
The Cubs and Seam Shifted Wake: Post 70
I identify strongly with the Cubs and Seam-Shifted Wakes, so it’s a good day. Sahadev Sharma published an article in The Athletic on April 11, 2021 about how SSW affects the Cubs pitchers. He had noticed something I had also noted: that compared to a lot of teams, the Cubs Continue Reading
PitchTracker: Post 69
Nice. One of the first challenges we encountered was a means to detect Seam Shifted Wake in pitches. Doing so requires a measurement of vertical and horizontal movement as well as spin metrics. Right now, if you are anyone other than a major league team (meaning you have a HawkEye Continue Reading
Baseball’s Tower of Babel: Post 67
My dad is a preacher and I’m prone to religious references. Baseball has a lot of technical terms. Unfortunately, many quantities are know by 2-3 names and the problem grows every time we obtain a new metric. I’ve been at this for about 2 years and I am amazed how Continue Reading
Relationship Between Magnus Effect and Potential Flow Around a Sphere with Circulation: Post 66
As you may have guessed, this one is pretty nerdy. Confession: I am not a real aerodynamicist. I’m a mechanical engineer who specializes in fluid dynamics. Aerospace Engineering also concerns itself with fluid dynamics, mostly with the brach we call aerodynamics. Until my interest in baseball aerodynamics, I had never Continue Reading
Magnus and Seam Shifted Wake Effects on Wilson 1030 and MLB baseballs: Post 64
My 14-year-old son plays baseball, and his fastball is about 90% efficient. So naturally, I was wondering if the baseballs that they use, which have very large seams compared to an MLB ball, move similarly to MLB balls. In my previous post, a Wilson 1030 baseball was found to move Continue Reading
Loopers, FA, CH, CU in the lab: Post 63
Here is an overlay of all the pitches I will be talking about in this post. Many thanks to Michael Augustine for making this beautiful overlay on short notice. Pitches 1-7, described below I am teaching a graduate measurements course this semester and the course requires a final project. I’ve Continue Reading
Not All Shifted Wakes Are Equal: Post 61
Twitter: @jwillyg20 It’s time to define a Seam Shifted Wake (SSW) pitch more carefully. The main feature is that a baseball’s seams can cause earlier flow separation on one side of the ball relative to the other. This asymmetric wake is what we refer to as the “shifted” wake (see Continue Reading