The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more. Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews
This year’s winning illusion, created by Arthur Shapiro of Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, may explain this phenomena. His animation shows a spinning ball that, when watched directly, moves in a straight line. When seen out of the corner of the eye, however, the spin of the ball fools the brain into thinking that the ball is curving.
So as a baseball flies towards home plate, the moment when it passes from central to peripheral vision could exaggerate the movement of the ball, causing its gradual curve to be seen as a sudden jerk.
(Note: posts were moved from this old thread. When you see references like “responding to #31”, subtract 30 from that number. So, Alan’s #2 post is referring to post #1, not post #31.)
Speed, strength, stamina, agility, flexibility. There are a host of human actions that improve from one generation to the other. The man versus nature competitions in the Olympics prove that any combination of human and/or technological evolution exists. But, it does not apply to free throw shooters in basketball.
Since the mid-1960s, college men’s players have made about 69 percent of free throws, the unguarded 15-foot, 1-point shot awarded after a foul. In 1965, the rate was 69 percent. This season, as teams scramble for bids to the N.C.A.A. tournament, it was 68.8. It has dropped as low as 67.1 but never topped 70.
In the National Basketball Association, the average has been roughly 75 percent for more than 50 years. Players in college women’s basketball and the W.N.B.A. reached similar plateaus — about equal to the men — and stuck there.
...
Ray Stefani, a professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach, is an expert in the statistical analysis of sports. Widespread improvement over time in any sport, he said, depends on a combination of four factors: physiology (the size and fitness of athletes, perhaps aided by performance-enhancing drugs), technology or innovation (things like the advent of rowing machines to train rowers, and the Fosbury Flop in high jumping), coaching (changes in strategy) and equipment (like the clap skate in speedskating or fiberglass poles in pole vaulting).
...
“There are not a lot of those four things that would help in free-throw shooting,” Stefani said.
The most obvious comparison method is average distance with wood vs. average distance with metal. The 30 wood bat homers averaged 373.1 feet, while the 230 metal bat homers that were measured averaged 408.1 feet (a few catwalk homers have not yet been analyzed). That’s a difference of 35 feet, or about 9.4 percent. A similar comparison of speed off the bat yields 100.6 mph for wood, and 108.9 mph for metal bats, a difference of 8.3 mph, or 8.3 percent.
The small sample size for wood bat homers means that there remains a lot of uncertainty in the “translation factor” from wood to metal bats, but knocking roughly 10 percent off the distance of a home run hit by a high school or college slugger can provide a good rough estimate of how far it might have gone with a wooden bat. For line drives that don’t clear the fence, knocking off about 8 percent of the speed off bat will give a reasonable wooden bat estimate.
I have a young kid, and I want to get him one of these types of gizmos, for the times he’s alone, and wants to have fun. Do you guys have suggestions or experiences you can share?
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