Alan Nathan presents his final research on how various elements such as spin and spray angle relate to the variation in distance we see in fly balls based on speed off the bat on launch angle. Interestingly, the best spray angle to hit a long fly ball is just to the pull side of straight away centerfield.
Today’s lesson is the physics of the broken bat home run.
A pair of scientists are busy mapping the brain’s decision to swing at or take a pitch:
Statistics such as batting average or on-base percentage have been used to assign value to players for decades. But these, deCervo likes to point out, are post hoc variables. They come only after the player has finished his at-bat. Now deCervo could produce graphs that pinpointed when the batter decided to swing versus when he decided to take, along the time line of the pitch, down to the millisecond. A hitter stands at the ready, sees a 90-m.p.h. slider come toward him, and makes no movement of the bat. DeCervo could still delineate the moment he made that choice to look at the pitch, rather than go for it. It registered as activity on the EEG. It registered as tiny explosions of neural action.
Sherwin and Muraskin did not care so much how the hitters developed their talent. They cared about describing it, in digestible data bites.
The idea is to be able to measure this in young players and determine who are going to be good at making the decision.
The article does not make clear if the researchers believe this is an innate talent or a learned quality. If you put a normal person at the plate for 10,000 pitches, I suspect they will build a good pattern recognizer for strike, not a strike, even if they never develop the physical qualities that allow them to hit a ball.
Andy Andres presents The Science of a Home Run at TEDxBeaconStreet. Maybe this one should be called a Ted Williams talk! 🙂
Andy Andres is next, speaking about biomechanics of pitching.
Update: Daniel Bard can’t seem to spin the fastball anymore.
Update: Now that I’m home, I wanted to update this a bit. They showed a great slow motion film of Tim Lincecum doing everything perfectly, then spent time trying to figure out what was wrong with Daniel Bard. There was conjecture in the media and from Bard that his release point was off, but the data didn’t show it. What the data did show is there is less spin on his fastball, so it’s coming in straighter than it did in 2010, when Bard was at his best.
Michael MacBeath talks about how balls are tracked. I’m waiting to see if witches are involved. 🙂
Update:When a fly ball is hit straight at a fielder, it appears to rise at a constant velocity. When the velocity changes, ball is no longer coming right at you. Same holds for balls hit to the side, fielers keep ball at a constant angle.
Dogs use same methods.
Fielders use the same straight line constant optical speed to catch grounders.
Can tell where ball is going by watching all fielders.
The Saber Seminar is about to begin with an introduction by Chuck Korb. The first talk will be on the science of catching fly balls.
It turns out that throwing a baseball really, really fast is a bad idea. I love the conclusion:
A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered “hit by pitch”, and would be eligible to advance to first base.
Tickets are now on sale for the 2012 Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball Conference. I attended last year and loved it, and am signed up for this year as well.
You will enjoy presentations and panel discussions with the manager of the Boston Red Sox, Bobby Valentine; team Bench Coach, Tim Bogar; Director of Professional Scouting, Jared Porter; BrooksBaseball.net creator, Dr. Daniel Brooks; baseball physicist, Dr. Alan Nathan; and many more including world renowned neuroscientists, physicists, sports medicine physicians, professional sabermetricians, professors, journalists, writers, and other baseball enthusiasts.
Register now: Tickets for the weekend seminar are $125, with a discounted pass of $65 available to full time students, with all proceeds from the event going to the Jimmy Fund. Help cure cancer while talking baseball with some of its top minds!
This conference is as much about the science of the game as the statistics of the game. If baseball appeals to your intellect as well as your emotions, this is the conference for you, and your money could not go to a better charity. I look forward to seeing you there!
The shortest possible road trip that takes you driving around the country to visit all 30 stadiums starts on June 6th in Kansas City.
It’s an interesting programming problem. I suspect it would be much easier to solve if you picked a starting city, rather than to solve for starting in all 30 cities. I remember learning the shortest path algorithm in my data structures class. It’s a good algorithm for teaching network data structures.
David Sheinberg is a Neuroscienctist who will talk about practice.
Update: How much of Ted Williams’s talent was genetic and how much was trained?
Update: Nerve transmission time is in born, not trainable.
Update: Practice improves no/go decisions, not simple reactions.
Baseball players are good at this.
Update: Taxi drivers brain changes as they learn navigation.
Alan Nathan starts the day with a talk on technologies for tracking the baseball during the game.
Update: Alan is a nuclear physicist.
Update: Nathan is showing a nice graph showing the effect of drag and the Magnus force on the flight of the ball. Drag can cut the distance in half, but you can get some distance back with the spin.
Update: Need seven parameters to calibrate pitch f/x cameras. Three for location of camera, three for angle of camera, one for zoom.
Update: Errors in data can often be trace to calibration.
Update: PITCHf/x uses a constant acceleration model to figure trajectory. Not exact, but close to half an inch.
Update: Alan is investigating if the data can be used to better czlibrate the cameras.
Update: HITf/x uses a six parameter model. Initial speed and angle are lower than actual speed and angle.
Update: Trackman is a 3-D radar tracking system. Gives full trajectory of pitched and batted balls. Tracks bat as well.
Update: Track an can find total spin on the ball. You also get landing points of batted balls.
Update: Moving from Denver to San Diego gives Ubaldo Jimenez about 6 inches more of break on his fastball.
Update: Thirty degrees is optimum launch angle for a home run. Ten to twelve degrees for a line drive hit.
Update: Great talk, best of the conference so far.
There was some interest in my comment that it’s possible to throw a fastball that actually does rise, in other words, moves up. There are three forces acting on a baseball, gravity, drag and the Magnus force which comes from the spin. The force from gravity depends on the mass of the ball and is constant. It pulls the balls down. Drag is dependent on the velocity of the ball and the density of the air. It pushes the ball back toward the pitcher, slowing it down. The drag force changes as the ball slows, so it is not constant.
The Magnus force depends on the direction and speed of the spin, the air density and the direction of the velocity. When you throw an overhand fastball with backspin, the direction of the force is up. It works against gravity. The faster the ball is moving and the faster it is spinning, the greater the force up. The estimate was that a 110 MPH with a 3000 RPM spin would actually rise the on way to the plate.
Lookout Landing does a quick study on the effects of LASIK surgery on hitters, and find in mildly helpful.
New York Yankees Update brings us the story of an eleven-year-old amputee who wants to play for the Yankees. He uses curved running legs to play baseball, but advances are now being made that people to control a prosthetic limb with nerve impulses instead of muscle movements. How far away is the ultimate performance enhancer, the bionic limb?
Brian Greene visits the Mets to talk about the science of baseball.
Genetic Future discusses the ACTN3 gene. There appears to be a link between this gene and sprinting success, but as Daniel MacArthur points out in the piece, there much more to it than just that one gene.
ACTN3 is just one of many factors influencing athletic performance
At the highest levels of performance ACTN3 genotype certainly make a big difference: among Olympic-level sprinters the frequency of individuals carrying two disrupted ACTN3 copies is vanishingly low (less than 3%, compared to ~18% in the general population). However, this large effect is due to the exceptionally strong selection that occurs during the slow climb to the Olympic level. The vast majority of athletes who start that climb will never make it to the top; those who do will be the tiny minority who have nearly everything in their favour, including the right genes.
So super-elite athletes need to have the right ACTN3 combination, but they also have to have a whole host of other factors working in their favour – this one gene is just a minor ingredient in a large and complex recipe. In fact, most studies performed so far suggest that ACTN3 explains just 2-3% of the variation in muscle function in the general population. The rest of the variation is determined by a wide range of genetic and environmental factors, most of which (particularly the genetic factors) are very poorly understood.
Someday, however, we’re likely to get to the point where these genes are well understood. At that point, we’ll likely be discussing gene doping (for lack of a better term). For example, would it be wrong to inject the protein(s) created by the ACTN3 gene if your copies are both disrupted? Would that be unethical, or is the person taking the protein just leveling the playing field?