Right. They probably call baseball games before wind speeds reach 90. 
Good point. I doubt anything like this os going on, but it’s the first proposal I’ve seen that might actually be feasible. Accuracy would suffer too much for it to be practical, though.
But the ball is part of the arm until the point of release and in the throwing motion the arm is behaving as a whip
I don’t believe anything can go faster than the mass propelling it. An ancient atlatl simply makes the arm longer, not only for more rotaional speed but also prolongs the time it is building energy for a longer power stroke.
Not because you say it is. It has no characteristics of a whip.
Also, rolling it won’t work either, as the ultimate velocity is ultimately determined by arm, wrist and finger tip speed at the moment of release.
Take a wicked fast ball as a case study… now, use the same arm motion, but don’t ‘snap’ the wrist/fingers as required for a fast ball, and the ball speed drops. The batter keys in on the arm speed (because he can see it), but is often fooled by the ‘change up’. Take out the wrist and finger snap, and the batter’s timing is off as the pitch speed is slower.
Arm speed, plus the snap of the wrist and fingers combine for the top speed.
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Does a fast ball have any spin? That would indicate some rolling.
A whip is an energy wave traveling down the line until it comes to a very low mass tip that needs to use up all the energy with very little mass. Similar to a sunami.
In the analogy, the ball isn’t analogous to the whip. The pitcher is analogous to the whip. The pitcher’s hand + ball is analogous to the tip of the whip.
Most all pitches have some spin - trying to deliberately throw a baseball with minimal spin is the esoteric specialty of Knuckleball pitchers.
If there is “some” spin, then there has to be tangential force which can push the ball slightly faster than the hand. I don’t know how much. It might be 0.001 mph faster, but the force vectors are there to do it.
Not true. Squeeze a watermelon seed, and it’ll shoot out of your fingers faster than the speed your fingers are moving at.
This is done with two fingers when throwing a fastball, as well as pretty much all the fielders. It may not add very much speed, but it allows the thrower to just be pushing the ball at the point of maximum speed. If he holds the ball tightly he might slow it down some before letting it go. That is a lot of the tricky part of the knuckle ball.
That’s fair.
Fastballs spin backwards, this is accomplished by grabbing the ball across the seams so it is called a four seam fastball. The backspin causes the ball not to fall quite as fast as it otherwise would so it appears to be rising from the perspective of the batter. Pitchers also throw a two seam fastball which has a slightly different spin, but all fastballs spin.
This is a very important point.
A pitcher is generally taught from the beginning to NOT grip the ball. Instead they’re just taught to HOLD the ball. You don’t pitch a baseball by gripping and tossing. Instead the ball is merely held. The at the end of that lever that is the pitcher’s arm it is propelled by the action of leg, back, shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers. Each step in that process adds velocity to the ball at the end of the lever.
Pretty much any object struck by a club ends up travelling faster than the club but that it is due to the storage and release of energy through compression and things and stuff. (I’m sketchy on the physics as you can see)
Amazing. Thanks, all.
It does but in the case of the golf ball it is also storing and releasing energy so the speed of the ball decompresssing against the speed of the club hitting it would likley equal the ball speed.
Hey man, aren’t you reading the thread? See post #9
If you coat a baseball with Vaseline then squirt it out watermelon-seed-style at the release point will it go faster than if it’s just thrown conventionally?
Otherwise, a conventionally thrown dry baseball must be accelerated to its cruising speed before the pitcher’s hand releases it.
I don’t think you’re allowed to coat baseballs with Vaseline anymore.
No, because rolling will also accelerate the ball faster than the arm. If you push the ball off the center, then one component of the force goes towards moving the ball forward even the the hand is not pushing it directly forward. The other component goes towards spin.
You can see this for yourself. If you float a ball in water and push down off center, the ball will to the side even though you are only pushing down. I don’t know how much of a contribution this has to the forward motion of the ball, but it is not zero.