5000 fps Camera Reveals the Physics of Baseball

concealment sends this quote from an article at The Physics of Baseball "This clip from Game 4 shows Marco Scutaro hitting the ball right near the tip of the barrel. The amplitude of the resulting vibration is so large that the bat breaks and the ball weakly dribbles off the bat. Note that the bat splinters toward the pitcher. The reason is that when the ball hits the barrel tip, the barrel of the bat bends backward toward the catcher and the center of the bat bulges forward toward the pitcher. That is the natural shape of the fundamental vibrational mode of the bat. Since the fracture occurs near the center which is bulging outward, that is how the bat splinters, as the wood fibers on the pitcher side of the bat are stretched to the breaking point. If the ball had impacted the bat near the center, the center would have bulged toward the catcher, as in the Yadier Molina clip. Had the vibrational amplitude been strong enough in the Molina case, the bat would have splintered toward the catcher."

Comments

First

[Anonymous Coward]

First pitch!

Isn't the game long enough already?

[lewscroo]

Great, way to make the game orders of magnitude longer.

Re:Isn't the game long enough already?

[nedlohs]

Just as long? Show me a five day game of baseball that ends in a draw. And if you are going to count "best of X playoff" multiple games as a single game, then cricket has the 5 test series, for 25 days of playing also ending in a draw.

Re:Isn't the game long enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

baseball, even more boring than fucking golf.

Regular golf is indeed boring..... ......but this variation you speak of .... tell me more about this "fucking golf". It sounds like an intriguing sport.

Is it televised?

Re:Isn't the game long enough already?

[Anubis IV]

As someone who played soccer/football in children and youth leagues and then later officiated the sport for several years, I have to say that I find it boring to watch skilled players on TV or from the stands. And it's not for lack of action, since there is plenty of that. The problem with it is one of pacing and difficulty in appreciating what's going on.

The athleticism and skill on display can be incredible in the sport, and when you're close to the action, it's fun to watch. But when you're up in high the grandstands or watching a zoomed out view on TV (which are the only ways most Americans have ever seen it), you can't appreciate the footwork that's being done, which is what makes the game so compelling to watch on a minute-to-minute basis. That leaves you with just the bigger plays, like breakaways, and the game doesn't hold up so well at that level when it comes to entertainment value. It basically boils down to sustained action for extended periods of time, interspersed by highlight-reel plays that are difficult to see, with very little of it actually amounting to anything. And with the ball changing sides so often, it's difficult to have a sense of when you'll see some hard pressure being applied or something important will happen. That's poorly paced as a source of entertainment and rather tiring to watch, kinda like a suspense movie that sustains the suspense for too long instead of raising and lowering it.

I have similar problems with watching hockey, but at least hockey has people smashing into each other regularly, which has an appeal as a darker form of entertainment (i.e. the same thing that draws NASCAR viewers...which I still don't understand). That's also a mark against soccer/football, since its players are oftentimes prima donnas that fall over in an unsportsmanlike manner at the slightest touch. No one likes seeing that.

Baseball has some similar issues as well, though it does have some advantages. It's easy to nerd-out on baseball since there are loads of statistics that actually matter and can make it far more interesting for those who are so-inclined. And as you get more runners on the bases, the tension steadily mounts, oftentimes culminating in a series of entertaining plays, with its natural breaks giving you time to read the situation and figure out where you should be looking for those plays. Of course, as the game reaches its end, you usually already know who the winner will be well in advance, thus undermining its enjoyment, and those highlight-reel plays are easy to miss for people who aren't as familiar with the sport, while much of the rest of the game is rather rote and boring.

In contrast, while I'm not an American football fan, I do appreciate it as being a well-crafted form of entertainment. The entire game is structured so that it has rising and falling tension, regular opportunity for highlight-reel plays that happen at prescribed times and can be easily understood from a distance, natural breaks that allow you time to appreciate the players' tactical positioning and movement, and a sense of progression as the play methodically moves back and forth on the field in a massive game of tug-of-war. It's a game that you can go pretty deep into thought on, as strange as that might seem for such a brutish sport.

Long story short, I do think that some games are inherently more entertaining than others, but I don't think that in any way establishes them as being superior. Personally speaking, while I'm not a fan of any of the sports I discussed, I'd rather go to a baseball game than the others, simply on account of the ambiance that is present at those games and the fact that there tends to be a stronger sense of good sportsmanship as a result of it being "America's pastime". The games tend to be laid back social outings, as opposed to the higher-energy (and sometimes downright aggressive) crowds you have in those other sports. My enjoyment of it is independent of the game's entertainment value.

Wrong about vibration

[Anonymous Coward]

The bat doesn't break the way they describe.

1) It doesn't bend in the middle, it bends close to the fixed end (where it is being held).
2) What they describe is not the fundamental mode shape of a held bat. They are describing a free-free beam, but bats are usually held.
3) It does bend similar to its fundamental mode shape. But it's not breaking due to vibration. It's being deflected by an impulse load and breaking.

Simple engineering, and they got it wrong.

Misleading

[Controlio]

They may use a camera that can run up to 5,000fps, but that's not the frame rate that was being shot.

There is no reasonable way to shoot high frame rates at night in the lighting conditions that exist in ballparks. Remember that stadium lights only actually project light 60 times per second, and not all of them fire at the exact same time (different power phases, feeds from different transformers and substations, etc). So while in sunlight you can shoot at 5,000fps (though no one does because it's impractical with the limited amount of time you have between pitches to show a replay), in large-scale HID (et al) lighting environments you can't shoot much more than 600-1000fps and still achieve a reasonable image quality. (Note that a referenced article in TFA says they shot at 3,000fps, but I still have major doubts that the captured clips or even the original clip which aired on television was actually shot at 3k FPS.)

And it's not just the frequency of the light, it's the amount. Zoom lenses lower the light that hits camera CCDs SIGNIFICANTLY. We experiment with high-speed cameras at long distances (center field pitch follow) quite regularly, and the result is incredibly underwhelming in anything other than direct sunlight. Though I will say, watching the movement and flight pattern of the pitch at high framerate in daylight is pretty spectacular.

Here (pdf) is an interesting whitepaper written by Grass Valley about the development of their super slow motion cameras, and the difficulties involved (flicker control, data rate, SNR, etc). The interesting reading begins on page 2. Note that this is NOT the camera used in the clips, the camera referenced is only doing 180fps - but you can extrapolate the complications presented in shooting 3000fps in HID lighting. (Side note: The referenced camera is the industry standard for smooth slow motion replay at 180fps. Ever notice that really smooth low-endzone NFL replay angle, or that definitive mid-1st MLB replay angle of the throw to first beating the runner? That's this camera.)

And in case you were wondering, the actual camera they used is here, though it was modified by a third party company to run at a higher frame rate.

This isnt science or revealing.

[xZoomerZx]

Not only is a variable being ignored its nearly the central reason for all the hoopla in this story. For all the millions of dollars wasted on major league players you would think that holding the main tool of the game properly would be a given but its not. Old timers from the dawn days of baseball knew this but it seems to have been forgotten sometime in the past 50 years. If these yahoos that call themselves pros really wanted to pound the ball they would learn how to hold the damn bat properly and not in such a way that it flexes excessively or breaks, both of which is an incomplete transference of the energy from batter to ball. The bat has a grain like all wood and this grain runs along the side of the bat at 90 degrees to the label. Holding the bat with the label up or down causes this area of bat to be the main contact area. "With the grain" the bat is much stronger and stiffer transferring more of the batters' energy to the ball and of course flying further. "Across the grain" the wood is weaker and more likely to flex or break as the fibers deform. No one has ever broken a bat "with the grain." In the bat breaking sequence you can clearly see the label is nearly square on to the direction of the pitch. The other vids aren't as easy to see the orientation of the bat but the excessive flex is telling. This "researcher" needs to find a player who knows how to hold the bat properly and repeat said observations. Then he will discover what the old timers who played in cornfields knew a century ago.

Could not use the Yankees

[transcender]

The author originally wanted to use the New York Yankees as the focus... However, he was unable to capture enough examples of Yankee batters making contact with a baseball during the ALCS to complete the study.