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FSN Sports Science clips

by Matt Smith

Happy new year everyone.

There’s not much on the tele, as per usual for New Years day, so why not spend a few minutes watching some clips about the science of baseball?  The Mister Baseball website highlighted some baseball-related FSN sports science clips that are on You Tube and they are well worth a look.

The first clip asks whether it is harder to hit a baseball or a softball?

They use a D-Backs minor leaguer in this test and it would have been nice to have put an experienced softball hitter in there as well. I would guess that a softball player would have the same struggles trying to hit the fastball as the baseball player did trying to hit the softball (although in both cases they would probably be more successful with further practice). So I don’t think they conclusively prove their point, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

The second clip tackles the question of whether a fastball is quicker than the blink of an eye.  While I doubt anything can truly give you the sensation of what it is like to face a 95MPH pitch without actually standing in the batter’s box, some of the footage in this clip gives you a fair idea.  As the voiceover states, hitting a fastball is “crazy hard”!

Of course, if you were standing in the batter’s box, you would have to deal with the fear of being hit. This is something that, to a certain extent, baseball players learn to cope with. Anyone wondering how much help the batting helmets provide should watch the final clip.

Watching that clip and then thinking back to the tragic death of Mike Coolbaugh, it’s hard to see why first and third base coaches don’t all wear batting helmets.

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