Surely a doper somewhere has a pizza box and a baseball lying around? Have a go and give us some experimental data.
I’ve been wondering that too. I live in a city and have bad aim, so I can’t really go around chucking fastballs and hoping for the best. Most batting cages have a pizza place nearby; hopefully someone out there has a kid who needs batting practice and can kill two birds with one stone.
Unless you’re powerful enough to launch into the stratosphere, in which case it’s more like 50 degrees because it hits the stratosphere sooner.
I’m not so sure about that. I’m not dismissing the idea out of hand, but I’m not so sure about that. You say: “it’s not too hard to notice a 50ms lag if you are looking for it”. I would submit that the expectation of finding the lag leads you to percieve a lag whether there is one there or not.
I concede that this is a possibility. However, I did pass Sinisterniik’s test with flying colors for what it may be worth.
By the way, I thought of another thought experiment (which one could actually do in real life):
Set up a metal stand on a shooting range. Hang a pizza box from the stand from two chains or strings so it will not spin. Try to send some projectile through the box so that the pizza box won’t start swinging back and forth in the direction of the projectile. If you cannnot do so, then it seems pretty unlikely that you could send a projectile through a pizza box like in the video and have it continue to fall straight down.
The results of Sinisterniik’s test lend credence to the idea that some people are capable of detecting a 40 ms difference, though it seems like they are not as good at a 40 ms delay as they are a 40 ms anticipation (and the delay is really what we’re concerned about when it comes to the video in this OP).
In any case, I’m now more inclined to believe that at least some people can detect those subtle timing differences if they are looking for them.
I did an experiment yesterday with a baseball and a pizza box. My pizza box was empty and from Pizza Hut. I leaned the pizza box up against the wall and threw the baseball as hard as I could with a couple of steps windup. The pizza box was dented and one corner was crushed. I did a second throw and the box was dented even more and the top came off but no hole.
While I can not throw nearly as hard as Cain does in a game, in the video he has not trying hard at all, I threw it as hard as I could and the box was much closer. I am very confident that I threw it harder than Cain did in the video. The box was stationary and leaned against a wall rather than spinning in the air, but I can not think how being tossed in the air would make a hole more likely.
Based on my experiment I don’t think there is any way the video was real. The only way it could be was if the pizza box was made out of a very different type of cardboard.
Unless you are a professional pitcher, I highly doubt that you threw it faster than Cain did, puddleglum. That being said, thank you for being the only one in this thread to actually try the experiment out and post some results. I appreciate it and will remember you always deep within my heart.
Several people have mentioned that the watermelon pitch was the one where his hand is shown throwing the ball. There seems to be somthing stuck to the side of the watermelon; you can see it when it is handed to the person who tosses it.
It would be nice trickery.
I am not a professional pitcher, but if you look at the video Cain is throwing probably around 60% of maximum velocity. He uses almost no lower body, minimal hip turn, he opens his shoulders slowly and uses almost no arm extension. Plus the pizza box I hit was probably fifteen feet closer than his.
Fake. No question in my mind.
The reactions of the kids and adults seems too hyped and incredulous. They’ve clearly been coached.
Your test would not have been valid for several reasons. The pizza box had a pizza in it with more mass than the baseball, an empty box would move to much, also if your box was dry it would be no comparison at all to a box with a moist pizza inside that had recently been steaming the cardboard. The higher humidy in the cardboard the weaker it gets, if it is actually wet the cardboard has almost no resistance.
Assuming that this is correct, you threw it as fast as him at best -certainly not faster. I’m still going on the assumption that you are not a professional pitcher and do not have super human strength, of course.
I wish my nephew was in town. He’s a minor league pitcher with a fastball in the high 90s. I’d get him to try it.
puddlegum - do you still have the box? Any chance you could repeat your throws, with an increasingly wet box? Because I’m going to guess your results will continue to replicate, up to the point where the box is nearly disintegrating (at which point how do you throw a soggy pizza-filled box 15 feet up into the air?). Well done!
Good on puddleglum for having a try. I doubt I’d manage any better. Tangent, why don’t you send your nephew a link to this thread and get him and a couple of mates to try it (and preferably video it)?
You can see something, that looks like a baseball already attached to the watermelon at the 40’ Mark of this video. This video is fake without question.
I think that’s just the produce label on the watermelon.
I talked with my nephew about the video a while back, but he didn’t try to repeat it. His opinion was that it was probably fake, and that remains my view.
I want the fakeness to be exposed because I’m absolutely shocked dopers very many dopers could think it was real.