Posted on 10/15/2015 5:21:55 AM PDT by JoeProBono
TOKYO, A Japanese swordsman dubbed a modern-day samurai sliced a 100 mph fastball in half 30 feet away from where it was launched by a pitching machine.
Isao Machii, who previously made headlines when he dueled a sword-wielding robot and sliced a shrimp traveling 80 mph through the air, drew his sword after the ball was fired from the pitching machine and sliced it in half in midair.
Video of the stunt, posted to YouTube by Oricon News, shows the ball was clocked at 100 mph in the air and was fired from a machine 30 feet away from where Machii was standing.
The video closes in on some of the remains of the baseball, which appears to have been sliced almost exactly in half.
“it appears he slices in the same direction as the ball’s flight, which means that his blade must have been traveling way faster than 100 mph.”
No, the blade did not have as far to go.
That’s pretty cool.
If the ball was moving at 100 mph as it passed him, he would have to swing at at least 101 mph to “catch up” to it. But a blade moving that slowly would not be able to slice through the ball.
“As I pointed out, the swordsman cut WITH the ball’s flight, not against it.”
The video that I saw, he cut it against the ball’s flight.
Not sure we saw the same video.
Didn't you see the video of a shrimp on a treadmill training to run/swim 80mph? And; you and I got to pay for those training sessions.
I’m watching on a POS phone so I may be mistaken on that. But it looked to me like he was cutting in the direction of the ball’s flight.
I watched it in slo mo on the computer I use to surf the net. Took a while to load, but what I saw clearly showed him with the blade moving toward the ball as the ball came toward him, and then cutting it in two.
The blade did not seem to be quite at 90 degrees to the path of the ball; probably more like 70 or 80 degrees when the two connected.
My suspicion is that he practiced a lot, knew where the ball was going to be, and went of the sound of the machine starting to launch, instead of a visual signal.
Sounds are processed much faster by the brain than are visual cues.
This sort of thing amounts to a parlor trick.
I have done similar things with “trick shooting”. They call it “trick” shooting for a reason.
He is probably a master with the sword, but I doubt that he is magical.
Some people are simply talented; combine it with long, hard, practice, and you can get results that most find hard to believe.
Jerry Miculuk does some amazing things with handguns.
Just watched it in full screen. The ball is coming from his left, and he swings the sword in an arc to his right. That tells me he’s cutting in the same direction the ball is traveling.
This isn’t one of those spinning ballerina pictures that your mind can turn in either direction. There is no way he cuts the rear of the ball, the sword hits the leading edge.
That’s not always true
I’ve batted many a cage that used genuine official mlb balls
Some do use the harder composite ones but some still use regulation stitched leather college or MLB BASEBALLS.....
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