Mythbuster staff appear in the video, but this is not an ‘official’ mythbusters event.
My sense is that is clearly a fake (quick cuts, overenthusiastic reactions, convenient product display) but there’s been a lot of debate over at metafilter, with no definitive results. Can anybody PROVE that this is false?
The video:
Metafilter discussion:
(Could the mods please add a question mark to my title? Thanks!)
I say real.
I’ve heard the controversy, but I don’t see why everyone thinks it’s fake. Matt Cain is clearly in the shot in each case, and you can see the flight of the ball from his hand to the target. The man is an MLB pitcher, and can consistently throw a baseball at ~90 MPH and hit a target (the catcher’s glove) from 60 feet, six inches. Here he’s standing maybe 30 feet away?
The toughest target was the first one: the 2-liter water bottle. All of the others are substantially larger than a catcher’s glove; do you think he’d really have trouble pitching spot on to Buster Posey’s glove 10 times out of 10 if he didn’t need to worry about a batter swinging at the ball? What he’s doing here is arguably quite a bit easier, even with the challenge of hitting a moving target.
Yeah, I’m not buying this one. But I can’t prove anything. It just looks and feels fake. It doesn’t even look like he’s throwing it that hard–more like lobbing it. But what do I know?
Looks completely real to me. His accuracy is amazing, IF he hit those on first try, but you don’t know how many takes it was. Otherwise what is the problem? If they wanted to fake it, they would have made the watermelon shot much more spectacular.
Yeah, but does it look to you like he’s throwing a 90MPH fastball? I’m not entirely sure a 90MPH fastball would go cleanly through both sides of a box and a pizza like that. I could see it going through a pizza box, but I would expect the entry and exits to look a lot different–more like a tear than a baseball cut-out.
But that doesn’t matter, he’s not in a full wind-up doing a 90MPH pitch here. It’s maybe 30-40 mph at the most from what it looks like.
Very fake. This isn’t the only thing, but one major thing is his throwing motion, which is what he’d use to toss to a 14 year old little leaguer. These aren’t anywhere close to rockets he’s throwing, and they’d never do anything close to what’s shown.
There are plenty of these sorts of videos out there (a sequence of amazing basketball shots; soccer balls kicked off the crossbar repeatedly…usually with a pro athlete as the performer.) People underestimate how easy it is to fake this stuff with software these days.
Exactly.
Yeah, this video has that “fake reality” look like those video game reality-style videos had a couple years ago. Unfortunately, I’m blanking on the video game they were ads for—something with a gravity gun, from what I remember.
ETA: Ratchet and Clank is what I was thinking of.
When I look at the pizza box, it looks like a tear to me, especially on the exit “wound” on the bottom of the box.
Also, it looks like the cardboard is pretty wet on both the top and bottom. I suspect that the pizza has been sitting around for a while. Wet cardboard is not strong.
Nothing looks fake to me. Major league pitchers don’t need a huge wind-up to throw a ball pretty fast, and two thin pieces of cardboard aren’t going to stop much of anything. Plus if Mythbusters faked a video, they’d probably be out of a job.
The more I look at these, the more I think there’s no possible way these are real. It doesn’t seem to be that the ball he threw could possibly take off that much watermelon and launch that piece up into the sky as much as it did. Like I said, the force of the throw doesn’t match up with what I see.
As for the “tear,” that’s not what I mean by tear. There’s nearly a perfect baseball shape on both the entry and exit of the box. There’s some sloppiness in the “exit wound,” but it’s still a clean, baseball shape for the most part. I would not expect that.
Now, I could and may be wrong, but I really don’t think it’s real at all.
Just a couple thoughts. Like I said, I may be wrong, but it looks like bullshit to me.
Why would they fake something that would be so easy to do for real?
Um, because that doesn’t look like it’s easy to do for real, maybe?
Looks like the next new episode, Nov 4, has the pitcher.
“More viewer requested myths and hit a home run with baseball legend Matt Cain. The guys test an underwater bike ride, if you really can ‘know it like the back of your hand,’ and the “potty dance”.”
Well, not easy for me. But it should certainly be easy for a start Major League pitcher.
I see no reason to call this as fake, none of the throws seem particularly impossible to me. He might of had a couple of attempts at each item and they’ve cut it down to his best attempts, but I really can’t see any reason to believe this is faked.
Well, hopefully we’ll find out soon. It’s just that the force and speed of the ball don’t seem consistant to me with the damage they’re doing. But who knows?
A good thrower uses technique, and that’s what this guy is doing. He launches the ball with seemingly little effort but you can see the ball is really hauling. When his throw hit the watermelon for example, it did not hit squarely in the middle but at the edge, an angle with more rind thickness to penetrate yet the ball still made quite a dent. I don’t think for a second that this was faked.
When Joe Namath threw a football you could hear the air whistle when he launched it, there was a definitive “snap”. This guy is one of those guys; someone who can really throw a ball.
See, that’s the thing. It doesn’t look like it’s hauling to me. And it’s not like you could do a lob motion and have the baseball fly off your fingers at 80+ mph. That’s just not possible.