Jury Idiocy Comes to Montana

[tcannizzo]

A previous poster hit the nail on the head - no pun intended.

It is not as much a matter of bat speeds as it is mental preparedness and anticipation.

The hits that come back up the middle are the ones that are grooved down the middle of the plate and belt high. The more experienced pitchers, in both sports, know as soon as they release the pitch that they better get ready for one coming back to the box. The less-experienced and less-skiller pitchers don't recognize this soon enough and can only try react only after the ball comes off the bat and THAT, my friends, is too late.

Experience and anticipation is not a silver bullet, but it is definitley a major factor.
More coaches should include this in their teachings.

[Sam]

A previous poster hit the nail on the head - no pun intended.

It is not as much a matter of bat speeds as it is mental preparedness and anticipation.

The hits that come back up the middle are the ones that are grooved down the middle of the plate and belt high. The more experienced pitchers, in both sports, know as soon as they release the pitch that they better get ready for one coming back to the box. The less-experienced and less-skiller pitchers don't recognize this soon enough and can only try react only after the ball comes off the bat and THAT, my friends, is too late.

Experience and anticipation is not a silver bullet, but it is definitley a major factor.
More coaches should include this in their teachings.

Its difficult to even justify this nonsense with a response.

1) Pitches thrown down the middle are normally PULLED and hit hard to the OF.
2) The pitches that get hit at the pitchers are normally on the outer portion of the plate or off the outside corner. They are unsuccessfully being pulled by the batter.

Funny how the poster would expect more out of an amature young girl than what he would expect out of a MLB pitcher.

These young ladies have all either been hit, have seen another pitcher hit, or have nearly been hit. They anticipate these shots.....

The problem is that the bats are juiced to make the hitters' parents happy. This game was designed to be played with wood bats. The hitters' parents have bastardized the game and endangered our young daughters that pitch.

[Skarp]

Softball is NOT an inherently DANGEROUS sport. It is a sport where a participant risks INJURY.

Can you explain to me how these two statements are not directly contradictory?

[MoeFoes]

Everybody is talking about the bats. Bats are rated at speeds right. Well arent the balls used rated just the same?
But why not just use a soft dot in all divisions? The game would suck and no one would want to play it or watch it but it would be safe......

You beat me to it. The balls are rated by COR and compression. Weren't they harder in the past? If we go back to wood bat performance, do we get the old balls back? Return pitchers to 40'?

Now thats a great idea. It would be like hitting rocks at the pitchers. They will easily be able to catch them but will probly break bones in their hand. I have and old school softball and bat. It would be like caveman softball. These kids would break their backs swinging an old alloy!! It would look like a 8u swinging a 31 rocketech.....

Question Crabby... Dont they treat the balls used in MLB before games. For safety sake wouldnt you want used balls for games instead of new ones....

[Sam]

Softball is NOT an inherently DANGEROUS sport. It is a sport where a participant risks INJURY.

Can you explain to me how these two statements are not directly contradictory?

Allowing a toddler to chase crickets at the edge of a 100 foot cliff is not an injury risk to me....it is what I would classify as dangerous....an activity which could cost one their life.

[SkinnyFats]

Question Crabby... Dont they treat the balls used in MLB before games. For safety sake wouldnt you want used balls for games instead of new ones....

Great question, and one you probably won't like the answer to. All MLB balls are indeed treated before the game. They are rubbed down with Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, gathered from a mud hole in New Jersey. And why are they rubbed down?

On August 16, 1920, Ray Chapman, a shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, was crowding the plate in the top of the fifth inning when he was struck in the head by an underhand curve ball from New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays.

Days later, Chapman became the first and only player killed by a pitch in Major League history.

"From that point forward the umpires were looking for a way to get a better grip for the pitcher on a new baseball," Bintliff says. "They tried tobacco juice, shoe polish, dirt from the infield and all of those things scarred or damaged the leather.

Lena Blackburne, a manager for the Philadelphia Athletics, had an idea. He cured and aged mud from a fishing hole near his home and took it back to the Athletics clubhouse.

It worked, and soon Blackburne was getting telegrams from teams asking for the "magic mud." By 1938 it was used by every team in the majors.

With all of the advances in baseball equipment over the years, the mud is still important, says Atlanta Braves pitcher Tim Hudson.

"A brand new pearl has kind of a slick finish on it," Hudson told CNN. "I don't think there's a hitter that's going to stand in the box without one being rubbed up because you just don't get a real good grip on it. It's pretty dangerous."

Safety first, eh? You hot bat fans could learn a lot from this story. Major League batters, some of the best athletes in the world, prepared and balanced, wearing helmets, wouldn't stand in there because it is too dangerous. But you want softball pitchers - little kids, off balance, wearing a visor - to tough it out and defend themselves. You guys are idiots.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/28/baseball.mud/index.html

[softballdadcoach]

So I read the first 10 or so pages of this post and then did some math after reading and re-reading and re-re-reading the "teach your daughter to hit" comments...

This particular incident occured in baseball where the rubber is at 60' 6". Just for the sake of argument, I used a pitcher distance at ball contact of 55' - in all probability, it's closer to 50' but too bad...

If the ball comes off the bat at 100 mph, it's to the 55' point in .38 secs
If the ball comes off the bat at 98 mph, it takes .39 secs to get to the same point.
Not a lot different...

Go all the way down to 85 mph and it still takes only .44 secs - still not a huge difference.

Now if the numbers don't mean much, I'm fairly certain I see MLB pitchers still getting hit by come-backers that they were unable to get a glove on. Sure, the hitters are bigger and stronger than the 17/18 yr olds playing legion ball, but then the pitchers should be faster (in theory) too.

While I tend to agree that the bats just don't need to be this hot, I don't know that I see enough of a variation from high-end composite to low-end wood to show a parallel between bat promotion and company neglegence and responsibility for not putting some sticker on a bat so junior will realize he's playing a dangerous sport.

Football helmets DO have the stickers and so do softball helmets. In fact it wasn't all that long ago that ASA mandated that stupid NOCSAE certification labels be on helmets too. Not that I know everything (remember, I'm from NorCal), but I've yet to hear of a player reading that sticker and deciding to not play !!

This is the same point I was trying to make--dropping the 'off-the-bat' speed of a composite bat, or even dropping down to a wooden bat, would have made little to no difference in the time this young man had when the batted ball came back at his head. It is time, period, that it takes the ball to get from the bat to, in this case, the pitcher's head that matters. Going from something like .38 seconds to .46 seconds would make little difference to an average ballplayer. If you don't believe me, go to the batting cages and stand over the plate in the 'fast' baseball cage and then in the 'slow' baseball cage. Try to dodge the balls--and this is with you having the advantage of knowing absolutely that the ball is coming right at you and you are already set to make your move and not following through from a pitch. Let me know how many of you are 100% successful--anything less than 100% proves my point, IMO.

The bat-makers in this case did nothing wrong--they played by the rules set forth by the governing body. And if you need a label on a bat to tell you that a batted ball coming off of it will impose a danger to anyone in that balls path, then you aren't showing too much common sense, again IMO.

[absdad]

"A brand new pearl has kind of a slick finish on it," Hudson told CNN. "I don't think there's a hitter that's going to stand in the box without one being rubbed up because you just don't get a real good grip on it. It's pretty dangerous."

Safety first, eh? You hot bat fans could learn a lot from this story. Major League batters, some of the best athletes in the world, prepared and balanced, wearing helmets, wouldn't stand in there because it is too dangerous. But you want softball pitchers - little kids, off balance, wearing a visor - to tough it out and defend themselves. You guys are idiots.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/28/baseball.mud/index.html

Then why is it expressly forbidden for a defensive player to put any foreign substance on the ball? Those things are slicker than snot out of the plastic. I agree with what you posted, but seems 180* to what our girls play by. Just askin'...

[Sam]

So I read the first 10 or so pages of this post and then did some math after reading and re-reading and re-re-reading the "teach your daughter to hit" comments...

This particular incident occured in baseball where the rubber is at 60' 6". Just for the sake of argument, I used a pitcher distance at ball contact of 55' - in all probability, it's closer to 50' but too bad...

If the ball comes off the bat at 100 mph, it's to the 55' point in .38 secs
If the ball comes off the bat at 98 mph, it takes .39 secs to get to the same point.
Not a lot different...

Go all the way down to 85 mph and it still takes only .44 secs - still not a huge difference.

Now if the numbers don't mean much, I'm fairly certain I see MLB pitchers still getting hit by come-backers that they were unable to get a glove on. Sure, the hitters are bigger and stronger than the 17/18 yr olds playing legion ball, but then the pitchers should be faster (in theory) too.

While I tend to agree that the bats just don't need to be this hot, I don't know that I see enough of a variation from high-end composite to low-end wood to show a parallel between bat promotion and company neglegence and responsibility for not putting some sticker on a bat so junior will realize he's playing a dangerous sport.

Football helmets DO have the stickers and so do softball helmets. In fact it wasn't all that long ago that ASA mandated that stupid NOCSAE certification labels be on helmets too. Not that I know everything (remember, I'm from NorCal), but I've yet to hear of a player reading that sticker and deciding to not play !!

This is the same point I was trying to make--dropping the 'off-the-bat' speed of a composite bat, or even dropping down to a wooden bat, would have made little to no difference in the time this young man had when the batted ball came back at his head. It is time, period, that it takes the ball to get from the bat to, in this case, the pitcher's head that matters. Going from something like .38 seconds to .46 seconds would make little difference to an average ballplayer. If you don't believe me, go to the batting cages and stand over the plate in the 'fast' baseball cage and then in the 'slow' baseball cage. Try to dodge the balls--and this is with you having the advantage of knowing absolutely that the ball is coming right at you and you are already set to make your move and not following through from a pitch. Let me know how many of you are 100% successful--anything less than 100% proves my point, IMO.

The bat-makers in this case did nothing wrong--they played by the rules set forth by the governing body. And if you need a label on a bat to tell you that a batted ball coming off of it will impose a danger to anyone in that balls path, then you aren't showing too much common sense, again IMO.

Those are baseball numbers and aren't accurate. There is a difference in speed with the speed a pitch leaves a pitchers hand with the speed it gets to the plate. Softballs will have the same physics. Do the math. A reduction to 88mph from 98mph gives the pitcher at least 11% more time. When you are jerking your head to avoid being hit, this is an eternity.

The bat makers could have seen that the limits from the associations were still dangerous....meaning somebody could get killed. They did the exact opposite and pushed the limits....some of the manufacturers even cheated. They are all competing to see which guy's bat will give the pitcher the least amount of reaction time.....that is....hit the ball farther with the same exact force.

[SkinnyFats]

1) Pitches thrown down the middle are normally PULLED and hit hard to the OF.
2) The pitches that get hit at the pitchers are normally on the outer portion of the plate or off the outside corner. They are unsuccessfully being pulled by the batter.

Yep, and what happens when you try to pull an outside pitch? You probably hit the ball off the end of the bat. A ball hit off the end of a wooden bat stings like hell, very likely breaks the bat, and doesn't go very far. A ball hit off the end of the bats we're discussing here can still be a rocket.