Posted on 06/20/2022 11:44:11 PM PDT by zeestephen
For much of baseball history, batting practice hasn't evolved much beyond 75 mph fastballs down the middle...Now, a wave of smart pitching machines are giving hitters a chance to practice against the type of major-league quality stuff they will actually have to hit in games, sparking a hush-hush race to optimize batting practice.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Since the 1950s, I have been wondering how long it would take for a pitching machine to duplicate everything that human pitchers throw in real games.
Next stop - perfect football passing machines.
We need robots that perfectly replicate faked leg injuries in soccer.
I wonder if any will take time off for Tommy John surgery?
But can it throw a spitball like Gaylord Perry?
No one could use slippery elm like Gaylord
Nope. Only the ball itself void of the wind up idiosyncrasies.
A robot Babe Ruth isn’t gonna be far behind.
"Challenge the Yankees"
Each player card had outcomes for each dice roll outcome (the Sabermetrics of their time).
Nope. We need automated balls and strikes caller at the ML level.
I guess I’m not old enough. Who is that?
Zephyrs - a desert wind.
I had a 1979 Mercury Zephyr...$300 in 1998.
Why have a pitcher at all? Just use the machine.
Rod Serling (end of show monologue): Once upon a time, there was a major league baseball team called the Hoboken Zephyrs, who, during the last year of their existence, wound up in last place and shortly thereafter wound up in oblivion. There's a rumor, unsubstantiated, of course, that a manager named McGarry took them to the West Coast and wound up with several pennants and a couple of world championships. This team had a pitching staff that made history. Of course, none of them smiled very much, but it happens to be a fact that they pitched like nothing human. And if you're interested as to where these gentlemen came from, you might check under 'B' for Baseball - in the Twilight Zone.
“I wonder if any will take time off for Tommy John surgery?”
They all will. It’s called a microcode upgrade. Plus, depot will be able to deliver parts as needed.
Thank you.
Yeah, I despise the DH and all the other lame rule changes they’re implementing.
The Astros will find a way to hack into everyone else’s machines...
I want to see the Dennis Eckersley mod.
Mustache flickering in the breeze, long leather glove laces dangling in the field of view, upside down delivery, etc.
Announcer making ‘comments’.
All these added factors are kind of like the 35 seconds that Sully got added into the simulations of the Hudson River landing.
When the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, he has given it 3 properties: vector, velocity and spin. Given modern PitchFx data it shouldn’t be that hard to fix a pitching machine that consistently throws Steve Carlton’s slider or Mariano Rivera’s cutter or Nolan Ryan’s fastball.
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