1/25/2024 0 Comments Seam shifted wakeThis spin, gyroscopic spin, doesn’t create movement via the Magnus effect. Next, picture a football thrown with a perfect spiral. Transverse spin - tire spin - creates movement via the Magnus effect. When they talk about curveballs plummeting, it’s the same force applied in a different direction. When people talk about fastballs rising, what they mean is that their transverse spin creates lift via the Magnus effect, making them fall less than a ball thrown with no spin would. A baseball thrown with this spin - a perfectly backspinning fastball, say - creates movement due to the Magnus effect. The tires on the car spin as the car moves, and if the car isn’t turning, the axis they spin around is pointed directly sideways (think of the car’s axels), perpendicular to the car’s forward movement. Picture a car driving straight down a road. If you’ve heard this part before, please feel free to skip ahead - you can Control+F to the words “frustratingly complex.” If you haven’t, though, let’s detour in this article full of detours to a quick discussion of spin. Nathan’s key insights - one shared by many R&D departments across baseball but most eloquently explained here - was that raw spin rate doesn’t all lead directly to movement. Doctor Alan Nathan has written several authoritative studies discussing the value of this spin data. When Statcast debuted in 2015, it added another wrinkle: radar tracked the spin rate of each pitch in flight, putting a numerical value on something that had previously been only qualitative a pitcher’s ability to generate movement through spin. When we say a pitcher has eight inches of horizontal break on their slider, it’s because new technology allows us to measure it. When we report a pitcher’s chase rate or how often a batter swings at pitches in the strike zone, it’s because the location where each pitch crosses the plate is recorded and logged. First, PITCHf/x quantified pitch location and movement. In the past 15 years, the amount and scope of pitch-level analytical data has exploded. The next step was velocity - radar guns let us appreciate fastballs numerically rather than merely aesthetically. For a time, that simply meant describing the shape of pitches - they don’t call them curveballs for nothing. At the end of the day, though, everything starts with the pitcher trying to throw a ball past the batter.Īccordingly, baseball analysis over the years has focused on describing the flight of that ball. There are other trappings - bases and baserunners, umpires, a strike zone, the mythology of Babe Ruth, and a million other sundry things. So let’s go over how we got here, to this newly observable way that pitchers deceive hitters, by starting at the beginning and working forward.Īt its core, baseball is a game about one person trying to throw a ball past another person. It has already changed the way that coaches and pitchers approach pitch design, and due to recent data advances, it’s about to be everywhere. Barton Smith (no relation) coined it, is a source of pitch movement that the first attempts at understanding the physics of a pitched baseball overlooked. “Seam-shifted wake,” as Andrew Smith, a student of Dr. A group of scientists and baseball thinkers are redefining the way we think about pitch movement, and I think it’s worth highlighting even if I don’t have anything to add to the conversation yet, because this new avenue of research is going to be front and center in Statcast-based analysis over the next few years. This is a story about how baseball analysis is changing right before our eyes. Today, I won’t be telling you some new insight about a player you like, or creating some new nonsense statistic that tries to pull meaning from noise. Hey there! I want to give you a heads up about this article, because it doesn’t fit into a normal genre I write.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |