Thursday, March 28, 2013
Deconstructing RA Dickey
Alan continues his fascinating look at RA Dickey, this time, by positing the effect of a ball being thrown with 1.5 revolution, compared to 1 revolution, and he says:
The two curves fall right on top of each other from release to about 40 ft from home plate, but thereafter they deviate strongly. Indeed, the red curve ends up on the outer edge of home plate while the actual pitch landed right in the middle. That's a difference of over 8 inches. The fact that these two pitches differing only in the spin rate behave so differently from each other gives us considerable insight as to why the movement is so erratic, i.e., so different from one pitch to another.
The knuckleball may very well be a manisfestion of what physicists would call Chaotic Dynamics, whereby small changes in the initial conditions of the system (in our case, the spin rate) give rise to large changes in the outcome (in our case, the location at home plate).
What about when the spin has backspin / topspin, or sidespin? How do the different spin rates affect the movement in those cases? And what kind of spread in spin axis does Dickey throw?
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