BASEBALL CURIOSITIES:

HOW DOES THE WEATHER EFFECT THE BALL?

Contrary to popular belief, a baseball travels farther in hot, humid weather. When the air feels “heavy” with moisture, it is actually “lighter”. Hot, humid air is less dense than cold, dry air, so a baseball that might not make it out of the park when hit on a cool day may have just enough “legs” on a hot, humid one to clear the fence.

 

PITCHING CONTRADICTIONS:

• The need to be aggressive without being emotional is just one of the many apparent contradictions that good pitching requires. Here are some others to keep in mind.

• You add power to your pitching motion by slowing down rather than speeding up.

• You pitch with your lower body as much as, if not more than, your upper body.

• Throwing hard requires a firm grip and a relaxed wrist.

• Velocity is the least important element of a good fastball and the most important element of a change-up.

• Perhaps the game's most effective pitch is a slow fastball thrown over the plate (a.k.a. a change-up).

• The less you throw a breaking ball, the more effective it can be.

• The less you try to make a breaking ball move, the more it will move.

• One of the best ways to take care of your arm is to throw.

 

DEBATE ABOUT THE BALL: DOES IT REALLY CURVE?

A fast ball is not the most difficult pitch to hit. Lots of players make a living hitting a good, major league fastball. The pitches that give most batters a problem are breaking pitching: curves, sliders, and split-fingered fast balls.

Baseball veterans often say they knew they had to retire from the game when they couldn't hit the curve ball anymore. These baseballs don't overpower batters like blazing fast balls; they hamstring players who helplessly watch them dance across the plate—hooking, tailing, dropping, and twisting in such unbelievable ways that some batters are convinced the sharp drop of a curve ball is really an optical illusion or the result of the illegal use of sandpaper to scuff up the ball.

Batters would like to believe that no human being could be talented enough to cause a leather-covered, five-ounce sphere to follow such an erratic course. “It just isn't natural”.

The curve-ball controversy has been debated so intensely that in 1941, Life and Look magazines took stop-action photographs of curve balls to determine if the baseballs really did curve. Life concluded: “evidence fails to show the existence of a curve,” while Look discovered the opposite: the ball does curve.

Even as recently as 1982, Science magazine commissioned scientists at General Motors and MIT to conduct a modern scientific investigation into the question. Once again stop-action photography was employed to show that a curve ball's curve is not an optical illusion but is based upon sound laws of physics.

 

INSPECTING THE BALL

It struck me how often the ball is inspected during a game, as if anyone who touches it has to make sure the ball has not changed its properties. If the ball disappears over the fence, another, like a youngster's dream pinball game, emerges from a black sack at the umpire's side. He looks at it and gives it to the catcher, who rubs it briefly, and after a glance fires it out to the pitcher; he looks at the ball and rubs it with both hands, his glove dangling from its wrist strap, and then, as he stares down at the catcher for the signal, his fingers maneuver over its surface feeling for the comfort of some response—yes, this time it will do exactly as he wishes! Who has not seen a shortstop handling an easy ground ball—two big hops and there it is for him to look down into his gloves and seem to read (National League, Chub Feeney, Rawlings, whatever), before plucking it out and zipping it across the diamond to the first baseman who, of course, in turn inspects it. If the last out of the inning, the first baseman lobs the ball nonchalantly to the first base umpire who cannot resist taking a peek too, just to be reassured, before he rolls it out to the mound where the opposing pitcher, emerging from his team's dugout, will stride up the slope of the mound to bend and pick it up for his inspection and then comfort his fingers with its texture.

From the book: The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, George Plimpton, 1987

The Baseball

"It weighs just over five ounces and measures between 2.86 and 2.94 inches in diameter. It is made of a composition-cork nucleus encased in two thin layers of rubber, one black and one red, surrounded by 121 yards of tightly wrapped blue-gray wool yarn, 45 yards of white wool yarn, 53 more yards of blue-gray yearn, 150 yards of fine cotton yarn, a coat of rubber cement, and a cowhide (formerly horsehide), exterior, which is held together with 216 slightly raised red cotton hand-stitched stitches. Baseballs are assembled and hand-stitched in Taiwan, (before this year the work was done in Haiti, and before 1973 in Chicopee, Massachusetts.

Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance—thrown hard and with precision. Its feel and heft are the beginning of the sport's critical dimensions; if it were a fraction of an inch larger or smaller, a few centigrams heavier or lighter, the game of baseball would be utterly different.

Hold a baseball in your hand. Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it. The game has begun".

From the book: Five Seasons by Roger Angell, 1976