For Baseball Fans

The pitcher is considered the key player on a baseball team. His value is based on his ability to balance the supposed three variables governing the tossing of a baseball across the 60-foot gap separating his release point from home plate — velocity, location, and “stuff”. Velocity and location are today easily measured (and nowadays magically displayed after each pitch on a TV screen). “Stuff” is immortalized in the tales of legendary pitchers, long-suffering broken-fingered catchers, sharp-eyed umpires, and bewildered batters. There is an extensive lexicon to describe what the ball appears to be doing during that brief flight (about four tenths of a second). It “breaks at the last minute”, “tails away”, “drops off the table”, “hops”, “sinks”, “cuts” and performs many more bewildering maneuvers. They may all be included under the general heading, “curves”, to describe any deviation from a straight line. Curveballs are supposedly created by the spin the pitcher imparts to the ball as he releases it, similar to the “topspin” and the “drop” in tennis and the “hook” or “slice” in golf. Its rotation as it moves through the air is said to subject it to unequal lateral or vertical pressures according to Bernouilli’s principle. (He discovered that pressure on a surface varies with the speed of the fluid flow over it, thus the pressure on the side of the ball spinning in the same direction as its trajectory will be lower and cause the ball to move in the opposite direction). Conversation about the varieties of curves made possible by this phenomenon have fascinated fans, filled the columns of sportswriters, and the pockets of professional pitchers since the game was invented.

The question of whether the curveball actually exists was debated as early as 1877, when a three-man expert commission appointed by the Cincinnati Inquirer was unable to agree about it. In those days the only available evidence was anecdotal, gathered from people with an obvious interest in keeping the topic alive. In 1941, with the development of stroboscopic photography (making possible split-second images of rapidly moving objects on photographic film by using brief flashes of light instead of a shutter) LIFE magazine conceived the idea of assigning Gjon Mili, a pioneer of that art, to settle the controversy. Mr Mili set up two cameras, one above, and one to the side of, the path between the pitcher’s rubber and home plate, and LIFE engaged two of the foremost curveballers of that era — Cy Blanton of the Philadelphia Phillies and Carl Hubbell of the New York Giants — to demonstrate their skills. The results were unequivocal : no matter what the pitchers themselves or the eyewitnesses “saw” the cameras detected no deviation from a straight line in any pitch except for that seen (in the side view camera) by the unvarying 32-feet per second per second descent caused by gravity. Not content with photographic evidence alone, the experimenters built a wind tunnel and a baseball impaled on the shaft of a variable-speed electric motor, to show that no human being could possess enough power in his arm or wrist to create the amount of spin that would be required to cause Mr Bernouilli’s principle to come into play. The ball was just too heavy and the velocity too low for it to happen. Furthermore, there is no theory in Physics that would allow a thrown ball to behave any differently as it neared the plate than it had been behaving all along the way there.

So what was, and still is, going on? Our 12-year-olds continue to practice “upshoots” and “inshoots” and our 20-million-dollar-a-year professional pitchers continue to talk of the differences between “two-seamers” and “four-seamers” and “cutters” and our professional hitters continue to recount how pitches “dove for the corner”, or “broke just as it reached the plate”, or “really had some hop”. Go stand in a batter’s box yourself and let your buddy throw you his best screwball and you will very likely in fact “see” it curve or dive or hop according to prediction, if not as markedly as Mr Blanton’s or Mr Hubble’s professional versions might. What to make of that?

Call an ophthalmologist. He will explain to you that the “seeing-est” part of the eye is the fovea, an extremely small area in the very center of the retina where the sharpest image is formed. It is this part of the batter’s eye that first focuses on the ball as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. The ball seems to him to be coming very nearly straight-on at that point and therefore remains centered in the fovea as it gets closer until (unless it is destined to hit him squarely between the eyes) it suddenly seems to swerve as its image leaves the exact center of the fovea. There is a tiny time lag as this takes place, and it is this time lag that is interpreted by the brain as a change in behavior — a “drop”, a curve, or a “break”. The ball appears to change direction as its image fails to continue directly toward the batter, but reports that it will be somewhere out over the plate. Especially if the interpreting brain “wants” to see it that way. Any policeman who has ever participated in an identification line-up will tell you that what the brain wants to see it will see, regardless of reality.

What though, you may interject at this point, of the non-rotating knuckle ball, which, owing to its lack of spin, is said to make totally unforeseeable dives and darts as it nears the plate? First, it is firmly subject to the rules of Physics. There are no variable forces acting on it that can vary once the ball has left the pitcher’s hand. It will travel in a simple straight line. The difference is then in the beholder’s expectations. If his expectations are that there will be unpredictable movement, then it will be perceived as unpredictable movement. In the ballpark this may make it an even more intimidating weapon than spin. Real quibblers may wonder why baseball’s experts have failed to ask themselves why, if spin is what makes baseballs curve, a spinless pitch can be expected to be especially unpredictable.

So now that that’s all settled we can accept the reality that the pitcher’s third weapon after velocity and location is not “stuff’ but his skill at the guessing game that constitutes every at bat, and we can teach our 12-year-olds to work on that skill instead of destroying the tendons in their arms by forcing them to perform unnatural motions that will likely deform their developing anatomies, yes?

Well, no. All that experimenting and explaining has historically had exactly zero effect on the real world of baseball. Not “approximately zero”; “exactly zero”. There is too much history, legend, and fame invested on the old beliefs. (Not to speak of too many dollars in the salaries of pitchers and their agents and the cost to the careers of politicians whose voting-booth support from fans can be jeopardized if they try to resist the blackmail of local cheerleaders for new taxpayer subsidized stadiums, and the ever-ballooning price of tickets.) We perpetuate the myths because they match our desire to be entertained. Don’t ask the magician how he appeared to have sawed the girl in half; just sit back and enjoy the show.

And what has all that got to do with real-world concerns anyway? Why do I write about it instead of about more “critical” issues? What has it got to do with Mexicans stealing our jobs, immigrants sponging on our wealth, welfare mothers frantically producing babies to fatten their child allowances, Muslim ladies hiding bomb six-packs inside their chadors, black helicopters guarding the secrets of Roswell, and global warming conspirators trying to bring down the capitalist system by inventing a boogey man called “climate change”?

Or for the questions of whether Hillary Clinton has really signed a blood pact with Satan to take away all male prerogatives in the United States or whether Donald Trump is just a rich man’s spoiled son with more libido than brains?

I leave those questions for you to meditate. I’m going to be busy with post mortems on the World Series.

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