It’s about 130ft from 2nd base to home plate. Looking at your link, and zooming out 1 step, I’d estimate the distance from the throw position (back of dirt behind 2nd) to the back of the bleachers as 1.5x the distance from home to 2nd (195ft) and Bay street at 2x (260ft)
260ft on the fly isn’t terribly difficult for a pitcher, nor is the idea of clearing a modest set of bleachers right behind home plate, while you’re still in the infield. It’s not so much that it’s a huge risk, but it’s an uncertainty that could have been avoided if they simply turned around, you know, if he was actually throwing a ball.
I took a screen grab from your link - direct overhead and not the tilted view my browser went to from your link. I got the map zoomed in as much as possible to get the infield and the street still in view.
I pulled the image into my cad software, and sized it as best I could using the bar scale in the lower left, which should be more than good enough considering how zoomed in it is and the distances we’re measuring.
I measured from the outfield edge of the dirt between 1st and 2nd to the back of the backstop in the approximate direction he’s throwing and I get about 195’. I get about 235’ to the nearside back of curb for Bay St.
And as a check I measured from where it looked like 1st and 2nd base should be and got 90-ish feet with the distance from the center of the pitcher’s mound to home plate at 60-ish feet, as expected.
Nice work. It took me a while to find the button that changed the view from 45 degrees to directly overhead. Like Cheesesteak, I’d put the critical distance (along the path of the throw) to the street at over 250 feet, but we’re all coming up with close numbers.
For no particular reason, here’s a popular search result for throws from the outfield. It’s a “strike” by Cardinal pitcher-turned-outfielder Rick Ankiel. Most of the links put the distance at 300 feet. He does keep the trajectory low and takes a step into the throw.
Again, this isn’t to say Cain’s throwing angle was or wasn’t potentially dangerous. It looked worrisome, and I imagine Cain could have easily reached the street if he tried.
I agree, but my instinct is that there is no speed which will leave a perfect “Wile E Coyote” hole through the box and pizza. That if you fired the ball fast enough to punch right through, you’d create a shockwave which splattered the pizza pretty good.
I write short science fiction stories and I’ve considered for years the ramifications of what will happen when video and photos can be faked so easily, cheaply, and realistically that it requires experts to discern the real from the fake, and how that would effect life or even the legal system.
Very good detective work, and thank you for following through on it. You’ve moved me from the “confirmed” camp to the “plausible” camp. Let me describe the straws I’m grasping at:
-That white powder is definitively Parmesan cheese in my mind, so that’s not really an issue for me.
-Tory’s hand is covering up where the dented/sauced box should be. If it’s real, you can’t tell by looking at that part of the box
-The inside part of the box could be covered up by the pizza crust at that angle. I agree that this image is the closest to a smoking gun anyone has provided, but the sauce could easily be back and to the left… back and to the left…
-There’s a cut between the shot of Kari with the box and Tory with the box. Someone (a producer) might have cleaned things up a bit so that he wouldn’t get sauce all over himself.
-If you look at the pizza itself, it looks exactly the same in all the shots. The Parmesan that exploded left a pretty discernible pattern that would be very difficult to fake. That leads me to believe that:
-If it were faked, there are different boxes but only one pizza. This is very possible.
-This, IMHO, could not be faked using a baseball launcher. The objects go different heights, all of which are variable on the stage hand’s throwing power and trajectory. Even Grant, Adam, and Jamie wouldn’t be able to manage those variables. So…
-If it were faked, it was done with some clever editing and maybe some CGI.
-I think that we can all agree that the watermelon and piñata are either real or plausible. The explosion from the pizza (which I’d imagine is mostly the red sauce) acts a heck of a lot like the watermelon. In my mind it’s either a clever cut and paste from one to the other (which I don’t think it is), it was triggered by remote explosion, or it was done in CGI. I don’t think anyone can CGI a spinning box exploding like that without making it look ridiculously fake. This makes me question how they’d accomplish this feat, especially when neither Tory nor Kari have CGI expertise.
I’m basically saying that you’re comparing apples and oranges and that the argument is irrelevant. We don’t know where the camera or boom mic was in the Babe Ruth footage and the Little League footage looks/sounds exactly how it should in real life, without “an extremely noticeable lag”.
I just want to jump in here and say that while your pizza box screengrabs are pretty compelling, I think there is a reasonable explanation for the “sawdust”. I have had Patxi’s a number of times and they coat the bottom of their pizzas with cornmeal and put plenty of extra of it in the bottom of the box. I think the substance is actually combination of cornmeal and pieces of crust that have been pulverized from the impact of the baseball. The crust on their deep dish pizzas gets brittle when it dries out, like say after sitting for an hour or more prepping for the stunt.
I think he may have actually thrown the ball at a real pizza and they swapped it out for one with a nice clean hole before showing it on camera.
This is true. I have played a number of games on this field and can tell you that the ground slopes down to the street, so any ball that clears the backstop/stands/trees will easily make the street.
That said, it doesn’t look like he is throwing hard enough to make it to the street. Check out the trajectory on the watermelon shot. It is starting to arch down and with the speed at which it’s thrown would not clear the backstop in my opinion. I think that he was actually throwing baseballs for the stunt, just not at a high enough speed for the ball to clear the field.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I think Cain did throw a baseball at a real pizza, but they swapped it out for one with a clean hole.
The ideal angle for any ballistic projectile in flight is 45 degrees. But the goal of an outfielder isn’t to throw the ball as far as possible, it’s about getting the ball to the target as quickly as possible. Here are a few reasons why outfielders throw on a line:
[ol]
[li]A straight line is the shortest path. A lower throw approximates this and will get the ball there quicker.[/li][li]It’s fine for the ball to skip once or twice on the way to the target and in some cases is easier for the recipient to catch. Lower throws skip more efficiently.[/li][li]The throw is often routed through another player, the “cutoff”, who can either let the ball pass to the target or cut it off and attempt to make an out elsewhere. Throwing too high and missing the cutoff allows the other runners to advance.[/li][/ol]
It’s hard to see what the angle is, but Cain is clearly giving the balls some loft and approaching the 45 degree angle, so we should expect his throws to be near the maximal distance.
Agreed - I crunched some numbers at lunch using the regular assumptions (frictionless spherical cow in a vacuum, flat earth, etc.) to see how far a throw like that might go and what elevation it would be at after traveling the distance to the back of the bleachers.
I checked it over but I’m not promising anything - so if anyone wants to verify my work, that would be welcome. Nothing rounded till the end in my actual calcs but I’ve rounded some of the figures below for easier reading.
I think if he wanted to he could definitely throw it over the bleachers to Bay St, and possibly over the taller trees right behind the bleachers, but it really depends on the initial conditions assumed and how much reality deviates from theory.
Hopefully my assumptions are in the ballpark (ha) of what we see in the video. But I’ve got it set up in a spreadsheet so if I didn’t mess up anything and you want a quick answer for different conditions just let me know.
A 70mph throw at 30 degree angle from an initial height of 5ft and landing at 0ft would go a horizontal distance of about 292ft. After traveling 195ft it would be about 40ft in the air.
Maybe not an expert, but if the SDMB was a jury for the first few pages of the thread the reals outnumbered the fakes, meaning that without a knowlegeable person someone could get falsely convicted is more what I was getting at.
So, we’re now going to say that a slowly thrown baseball can punch a hole in a pizza box?
We started off wondering if it was physically possible for a human to throw fast enough to do it, now it’s so easy to do, you don’t even have to throw hard.
A 70 mph throw at 45 degree angle from an initial height of 5 ft and landing at 0 ft would go a horizontal distance of about 332 ft. After traveling 195 ft it would be about 84 ft in the air.
I didn’t realize how much air resistance would affect the trajectory for the kinds of conditions we’re talking about.
For anyone who’s interested, here’s a projectile simulator that has properties for a baseball and some other objects built in and it let’s you toggle air resistance off/on. I have no idea how accurate it is but it’s from a presumably respectable source. Use your own assumptions and draw your own conclusions.
I should have looked for this kind of thing before bothering to crunch the numbers. Duh.
No, I mentioned twice on the last page that I believe the pizza stunt was faked. I think the shot of Cain throwing a baseball at the pizza is real, I just think they cut away and swapped in a different pizza box and pizza with nice round holes in them.
I never said I thought the ball was thrown slowly either, I proposed that Cain backed off a little on his velocity to keep the ball on the field. From sich_hinaufwinden’s analysis, a ball thrown at 30 degrees at 70 mph would come close to clearing the bleachers. I think the stunts could be accomplished with throws around that speed, especially if the items were weakened beforehand.
I am skeptical of soda bottle and pinata shots and think the items must have been rigged in some way (soda bottle shaken / bottle integrity weakened, pinata made to break in half), and I do think the watermelon one looks the most reasonable. But it was mostly editing tricks and practical effects for the ones they cheated, imo.
I don’t know at this point what you all were measuring, but I believe that the video is actually 20 frames per second. I think that would change the speed of the throw to more like 47 mph, for whatever assumptions this calc was based on.
That is, the 8 frames you counted at an assumed rate of 30 frames per second would equal 0.267 seconds in your calcs. But at 20 frames per second, it would take a longer time of 0.400 seconds for the ball to go whatever distance this was based on.
If I haven’t messed up the math, that’s a pretty low speed throw (for Cain) that wouldn’t have come close to going over the bleachers if he missed but, more importantly, wouldn’t have likely gone through the pizza box either.
Short story long:
The ability to frame step through youtube videos as noted seems to depend on how much bandwith is available and at what resolution you’re trying to watch - i.e., how much info you’re asking for.
Based on trying it at home and at work and at different resolutions and different times of day…sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes when it doesn’t work in a higher resolution it will do so in a lower resolution.
When it does work, it definitely seems to be frame by frame and when it doesn’t work, the video jumps by a few seconds with each key press. I’ve seen no in between.
So anyhow, at a time when I was able to step through a frame at a time, I consistenly counted 20 frames per second. That’s based on the youtube clock in the lower left corner showing the elapsed playing time.
I counted frames for a few seconds of play time at a couple of different points in the video for resolutions of 480p and 720p. That’s a lot of frames to count and a lot of cursor key mashing and it was consistent.
There’s so much information in this thread from varying fields of study, I swear the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is tucked away in here somewhere.