General

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

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

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

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