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Spin rates


Tank

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9 hours ago, Tank said:

Why should I care about them?

They matter, but it is most nuanced than just simply "spin rates."

The idea is that as the ball spins more, the more it can shift and induce either a swing and miss or "non-barreled" contact.

There's more to it than that - vertical movement, horizontal movement, etc all matter, but spin rate is a useful metric to assess, too.

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Well, what people call "movement" is spin rate. 

The ball spins as it's thrown through the air and the seems create differentials in pressure. The more spin the more affect this has. It's basically a way to qualify movement or the ability to get movement on a pitch and thus strikeouts. There will be pitchers who make good use of their movement and others who don't. But asking why you should care is like asking why you should care about velocity. There are plenty of pitchers who have tons of velocity and fail, just like there are plenty of pitchers with high spin rates who fail. 

It seems weird to start a thread to tell everyone you don't know how Google works.

https://www.drivelinebaseball.com/2019/01/deeper-dive-fastball-spin-rate/#:~:text=Spin rate is important to,outcomes a pitcher gives up.&text=There is a large amount,different pitchers and their repertoires.

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4 hours ago, eaterfan said:

It seems weird to start a thread to tell everyone you don't know how Google works.

well, okay, i wasn't aware that i was doing that. should i apologize for having done this?

i figured some here who are more into advanced stats than i am would have a more down-to-earth explanation. 

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18 minutes ago, Tank said:

well, okay, i wasn't aware that i was doing that. should i apologize for having done this?

i figured some here who are more into advanced stats than i am would have a more down-to-earth explanation. 

In all honesty, the idea of spin rate has been around for a long time but never quantified.    It was A. Bartlett Giamatti that first began the idea of quantifying what baseball players have always known by having physicists explain what forces are acting on a baseball and bat during play.  There was a book published titled The Physics of Baseball by Robert Adair that was the result of Giamatti's interest.  Robert Adair was a physicist at Yale when Giamatti was the Yale president.

Stephen J. Gould (Harvard-Palentologist) also wrote many essays about the evolution of baseball using evolutionary concepts; my favorite being why we will never see another .400 hitter again.  The Physics of Baseball is a solid read....I haven't thought about it since I read it when the book was first published.

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40 minutes ago, Tank said:

well, okay, i wasn't aware that i was doing that. should i apologize for having done this?

i figured some here who are more into advanced stats than i am would have a more down-to-earth explanation. 

I'm sorry. I interpreted your tone wrong, but 90% of posts like this are just a way for the OP to say "I don't care about advanced stats" and they are making me uncomfortable when they are brought up on the broadcast. How many threads on this board are "WAR: what is it good for? Absolutely Nothing!" Let's bag on stat nerds. 

And as you can see by many of the replies in this thread, it seems like your post was begging for the response "you shouldn't care." 

If you really do want to learn more about spin rates and what spin does on a ball there's a ton of stuff online. I provided a link to a good starter article. Maybe a question beyond "Why should I care about something, will get a more serious discussion with more in depth answers. 

I really do apologize if you were being serious in your original post.

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It's about the turbulence that the ball creates as it moves through the air creating drag or lift. Because of the difference between the smoothness of the leather and the comparative roughness of the seams of a baseball, small areas of turbulence are created as it travels though the air. The more you spin the baseball, the more often these alternating areas of rough and smooth travel through the air and therefore more turbulence is created, which in turn creates more drag on the ball. 

A certain amount of directional spin causing a vortex at the rear of a projectile will keep it true (hence the rifling on a gun barrel keeping bullets straight by spinning them, and opposite to that knuckle balls being anything but straight), and spin in a direction that is not in line with the direction of the projectile (a cutter for example) will create an imbalance in the turbulence around the ball and cause drag in a different direction - the more counter-directional spin a pitcher can put on the ball, the more turbulence will be created, therefore more drag will be created, therefore the more movement the pitcher will achieve. As the ball reduces in speed these counter forces of drag come more into play and therefore more movement will occur the closer the ball travels to the plate.

Ergo, more spin usually means more late movement.

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2 hours ago, WicketMaiden said:

It's about the turbulence that the ball creates as it moves through the air creating drag or lift. Because of the difference between the smoothness of the leather and the comparative roughness of the seams of a baseball, small areas of turbulence are created as it travels though the air. The more you spin the baseball, the more often these alternating areas of rough and smooth travel through the air and therefore more turbulence is created, which in turn creates more drag on the ball. 

A certain amount of directional spin causing a vortex at the rear of a projectile will keep it true (hence the rifling on a gun barrel keeping bullets straight by spinning them, and opposite to that knuckle balls being anything but straight), and spin in a direction that is not in line with the direction of the projectile (a cutter for example) will create an imbalance in the turbulence around the ball and cause drag in a different direction - the more counter-directional spin a pitcher can put on the ball, the more turbulence will be created, therefore more drag will be created, therefore the more movement the pitcher will achieve. As the ball reduces in speed these counter forces of drag come more into play and therefore more movement will occur the closer the ball travels to the plate.

Ergo, more spin usually means more late movement.

Your spin on this makes the most sense, even if I did not read it.

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