The rising fastball: baseball's impossible pitch.
Batters in professional baseball are confronted with pitches that appear to curve, dip, wobble, or rise. The rising fastball is a pitch where the ball appears to hop up as much as a third of a meter with a sudden increase in speed. Physics experiments confirm that many reported trajectories are possible, but not the rising fastball. The present paper shows how the apparent rise may be explained as a perceptual illusion due to the hitter underestimating original speed of the pitch.
McBeath
M K
MK
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, CA 94305-2130.
D000054:Acceleration; D001288:Attention; D001484:Baseball; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D009903:Optical Illusions; D009949:Orientation; D010469:Perceptual Distortion; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011601:Psychophysics