It is said that a forkball has a large drag force among various pitched balls in baseball games. To investigate this reason, the authors solve flows around a rotating baseball thrown in several conditions and visualized them. We found that the wake of the forkball is strongly influenced by the seam position and changes its direction like a knuckle ball because its spin is slow. The strong drag ...

In Rob Neyer's chapter on San Francisco in his Big Book of Baseball Lineups, he speculates that there aren't really good baseball cities, and that attendance more closely correlates with winning percentage than with any other factor. He also suggests that a statistically minded person look at this. I took the challenge and have been playing with a lot of data. This article is available at The C...

Humeral shaft stress fractures are being increasingly recognized as injuries that can significantly impact throwing mechanics if residual malalignment exists. While minimally displaced and angulated injuries are treated nonoperatively in a fracture brace, the management of significantly displaced humeral shaft fractures in the throwing athlete is less clear. Currently described techniques such ...

The authors compared the longevity of all baseball players alive at the time of their induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame with age-matched controls who were likewise alive at the time of the Hall of Famer's induction, and also matched them for career length, player position, and body-mass index, to assess if fame in sports is associated with increased longevity. Median post-induction survi...

The present study investigated differences in height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) between left-handed and right-handed Japanese professional baseball pitchers and batters. Some 345 pitchers and 356 batters who played in 2001, and 352 pitchers and 269 batters who played in 2011 were evaluated. Analyses of variances (ANOVAs) revealed significant differences in height and weight, but not BMI...

Baseball is a top strategic collective game that challenges the team manager’s decision-making. A classic Nash equilibrium applies for non-cooperative games, while a Kantian equilibrium applies for cooperative ones. We use both Nash equilibrium (NE) and Kantian equilibrium (KE), separate or in combination, for the team selection of strategies during a baseball match: as soon as the selection of...

A review is presented of the importance of the moment of inertia (MOI) to the performance of a sporting instrument. It is shown that for a given coefficient of restitution (COR), both the intrinsic power and the swing speed of a tennis racquet or baseball bat correlate strongly with the MOI about an axis through the handle and only weakly with the mass. It is further shown that for non-wood bas...

CASE SCENARIO The patient is a 12-year-old male whose chief complaint is fatigue. The dad, also his son’s coach, tells you that his son is only tired before baseball practice and just wants to “sit on the bench.” He seems to have boundless energy to play video games with his friends on the weekends and is doing well in school. The patient has been playing baseball since he was 5 years old. He i...

This article describes a system that automatically recognizes individual pitch types like screwballs and sliders in baseball broadcast videos. These decisions are currently made by human specialists in baseball, who are watching the broadcast video of the game. No automatic system has yet been developed for identifying individual pitch types from single view camera images. Techniques using mult...

A study has been undertaken to develop techniques for assessing baseball bat durability and performance. Experimental investigations were conducted by constructing a testing device to simulate the ball-bat interaction occurring in play. A sensitivity study of the machine’s inertia and forces on the bat were found to have a small effect on hit ball speed, and a much larger effect on bat stress. ...