And, as appropriate for your your username, there is Joe Smith.
And you mean Chad Bradford.
I don’t know much about cricket, but I think the fact that there are more positions than players is just great. For instance, I would like the DH rule a lot more if the DH also had to pitch the 8th inning and sell Cracker Jack during the seventh-inning stretch.
I’ll watch more closely the next time he pitches, but I’m pretty sure that all of Duque’s agonizingly slow pitches are curveballs.
That’s a given. You can’t throw a baseball without some arc. I just wanted to rule out an very high arc (e.g., the Eephus pitch).
I think that’s an issue with the calculation: the assumption is that the ball is released (say, about 7 feet above the level of the plate, if you count the pitcher’s height and the height of the mound) and travels in a straight line to the level of the batter’s knees. But to throw that way would require a very fast pitch, not a slow one (the faster you throw the ball, the flatter the arc you need to use).
Yes, it adds a whole extra dimension to the game. For instance, if your fast bowler is having a good day and getting the ball to swing out and bounce at pace, you can cash in by setting four slips and a gully to maximise the chance of a catch off an edged shot - but that leaves only four fielders (other than 'keeper and bowler) to cut off the run-scoring shots, so you may get your man quickly or bleed lots of runs quickly.
Rarely, nine slips have been seen (an arc from the batsman’s six-thirty through to eight-thirty, if the bowler’s at twelve o’clock) - such as when there’s only one man to get out and a hopeless amount of runs to be scored. 
I think that by “no arc”, people are assuming that the ball never rises above the height at which it’s released. That is quite physically possible.
Five-thirty to three-thirty, of course. :smack:
How is it possible to do that and throw a strike, given that a ball released in the horizontal plane (at 53 mph) falls eight feet on the way to the plate?
I don’t know how tall the pitcher’s mound is, but if the pitcher is tall enough and the batter is short it’s conceivable. Also, a faster ball won’t drop as much before it gets to the strike zone.
Very much so – but in order to get a flat trajectory, you have to throw the ball very hard, which means the pitch would be fast. If you throw a “straight” pitch at 50 mph, it’ll never reach the plate.
I’m not disallowing an arc, just not an excessive one like in an Eephus pitch.