All major league balls were covered in horsehide until this got too expensive; cowhide became the official covering after On the question of how often the ball gets changed, the rules actually give the home plate umpire a fair amount of discretion.
Per rule 3. Since a typical major league game takes roughly pitches to complete these days, the home plate umpire might wind up replacing the ball nearly four dozen times. Up till then, umpires tended to leave the same ball in play if they could — fans were pressured to give back foul balls — and pitchers and fielders tended to deface the ball every chance they got.
Balls were scuffed, scratched, and spat on to make them spin funny, and soiled to make them harder for the batter to see. Right around the same time, Babe Ruth was dismantling the long-held conventional wisdom that trying to hit the ball out of the park would just result in a lot of long fly outs; others followed his lead, and soon a full-fledged explosion of offense was under way.
In a team of University of Rhode Island scientists reported that the cores of major league baseballs from and bounce higher than ones from the 60s and 70s and that they contain materials that could make them livelier. But another study found no difference between balls manufactured in and , despite a jump in the number of home runs in Same policy that all large sellers have. Welcome to digital commerce. I think therein lies the rub. The seller sold an SGC graded card. He did not get an SGC graded card back.
On eBay or anywhere else. Maybe I'm not being scammed,,,,,Hope not, but I will update. So pack was delivered back to me As Pristine as the day it was Manufactured in ! Dude must see Conspiracy's everywhere! That is a pack? I thought they would be in a folded wrapper like in the Topps. I am not familiar with anyway, but this kind of pack is hard to tamper with the way it is sealed. The customer did return the item to you safe and sound. No scam.
Some people are picky and return an item for any number of reasons that they do not want to state, but give some reason in order to have that opportunity to return it. Also, it looks like a card is visible through the wrapper, so maybe he saw it and thought this was not a good sequence? We can speculate for days on end. Bottom line, this was not a scam, just a return. Scams do exist, but so do returns which to us may look fishy, suspect, or just plain strange, but that does not mean anything nefarious is behind it.
DeutscherGeist said: That is a pack? Yes - that's known as a "Michigan" pack. I opened it on my Birthday and got a Tony Gwynn! Glad OP got the pack back -- maybe it's a sign you should open it and you will get one of the big Neil, How about some fun? Three card lots: A ; ; C ; D ; E ; Post pictures in order once lots are all purchased. If the cards suck I am in for lot B! These features are consistent with the basic physics of the Magnus force which requires both speed and backspin to provide an upward force.
Now that all the pesky physics and math details are out of the way, we can finally have a bit of baseball fun. Of course, the ones we need to examine must have high velocity and high backspin. The pitch with the highest backspin is generally the four-seam fastball. Numero uno is no surprise — Aroldis Chapman, who hurls over half his pitches above the century mark. In fact, Chapman threw 25 pitches over mph!
Mauricio Cabrera fired 52 between and mph. Plotting them on the backspin vs. The color on the left of the table above corresponds to the data point on the graph. I got 0. In other words, Chapman is surprisingly close to being able to throw the mythical rising fastball.
To be fair, I am using the starting speed of his pitches and we need to remember pitches at this speed pitches slow down by eight to nine mph during their flight to the plate. So, the Magnus force I calculated is the maximum which occurs when the ball is released.
The lift will drop about ten percent on the way to home. So, what would Chapman have to add to his already superhuman fastball to make it rise? Looking at the horizontal dashed line in the graph it appears that with the same spin rpm Aroldis would need to throw the ball at mph. If instead he can maintain the speed, the vertical dashed line shows he could spin the ball at a rate of rpm.
There are other possibilities that would include lesser increases in both velocity and backspin. However, it would seem that these are beyond human mechanical abilities. Nonetheless, as a friend of mine is prone to say, it is still nice to think about. I wonder if some pitchers who throw a fastball at a more normal speed are still effective because their spin rates are higher than normal?
Mets rookie reliever Paul Sewald comes to mind. His fastball is rpm, even though he only throws it at 92 mph. We cannot, as humans, track the entire path of the ball, so our brain picks intervals to gauge the pitch track.
This makes it possible for a ball to drop less than the hitter expected, and for him to swing over it.
Viscous torque also slows down the spin of the ball while in flight. So for fringe cases the ball may start out as a rise-ball, then drop again. Jose Abreu also experienced significant good fortune, as many of his 36 home runs just barely cleared the fence , causing his home runs to have an average intrinsic value I of 1. All of these batters have below-average running speed and several Moss, Teixeira, Santana also had sufficiently predictable batted-ball distributions against which opposing teams were able to employ extreme defensive shifts.
In , McCracken suggested pitchers have little control over the result of opponent batted balls that are not home runs. Since then, however, a number of researchers really , lots of them have presented evidence that pitchers can have some effect on the expected outcome of balls in play.
As with batters, we can assign the intrinsic value, I, to the collection of batted balls allowed by a pitcher. Eight of the 10 pitchers in the table had an average fastball speed in above the league average, and Richards, who earned the top spot in the list, enjoyed one of the highest average fastball speeds in the majors. The success of the two softer-tossing pitchers on the list was due in part to an exceptional sinker for Keuchel and an exceptional split-fingered fastball for Cobb.
An interesting topic for future research will be to study pitcher characteristics that lead to low values of I. The statistics that measure the intrinsic quality of contact for batters and pitchers are influenced less by random variation from contextual variables than traditional statistics that depend on batted-ball outcomes. An important advantage of generating separate statistics to represent distinct skills is that each statistic can be regressed and projected using its individual reliability and aging curve during forecasting.
The new statistics also allow us to investigate how players control quality of contact. We observed, for example, that many of the pitchers who were the most effective at controlling contact also exhibited an above-average fastball velocity. I also thank Alan Nathan and Tom Tango for helpful comments on a previous draft of this article.
I am happy to acknowledge the help of Qi Shi in the preparation of this document. I always liked what wOBAcon was trying to get at but the results were so noisy. The pitchers also made a ton of sense. Richards yielded a. This is awesome. Is it possible to publish a list of all batter and pitcher I as a spreadsheet or list? Great stuff Glenn! Would it be possible to most your accuracy rates as well? Maybe just something as simple as pr HR HR predicted or something? Good question.
That makes sense. Classification accuracy seems like the easiest approach. I have appended the lists for batters and pitchers to the end of the addendum file which can be accessed at. Pleasantly surprised to see my name mentioned, thank you! Man oh man, I did this already, two years ago. HEWCO doubles as a player development tool and triples as a hitting philosophy. California has twice the population of New York. Think of all the gasoline not used if people used that train instead of driving their cars.
It does raise one fundamental problem: why play the game at all? Add up all the values to determine who wins the game?
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