The rising fastball: baseball's impossible pitch

The rising fastball: baseball's impossible pitch

Batters in professional baseball are confronted with pitches that appear to curve, dip, wobble, or rise. The rising fastball is a pitch where the ball appears to hop up as much as a third of a meter with a sudden increase in speed. Physics experiments confirm that many reported trajectories are poss...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Perception (London) Vol. 19; no. 4; p. 545
Main Author: McBeath, M K
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States 01-01-1990
Subjects:
Acceleration
Attention
Baseball
Discrimination Learning
Humans
Male
Motion Perception
Optical Illusions
Orientation
Perceptual Distortion
Psychomotor Performance
Psychophysics
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Summary:Batters in professional baseball are confronted with pitches that appear to curve, dip, wobble, or rise. The rising fastball is a pitch where the ball appears to hop up as much as a third of a meter with a sudden increase in speed. Physics experiments confirm that many reported trajectories are possible, but not the rising fastball. The present paper shows how the apparent rise may be explained as a perceptual illusion due to the hitter underestimating original speed of the pitch.
ISSN:0301-0066
DOI:10.1068/p190545