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The
Gyroball Mystery |
Posted:
12.20.06
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The Boston Red Sox have signed star Japanese pitcher Daisuke
"Dice-K" Matsuzaka to a six-year, $100 million contract,
with many fans hoping he will throw the fabled "gyroball,"
possibly the first new pitch since 1976.
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Officially, Matsuzaka commands an impressive repertoire of pitches:
a fastball, curveball, slider, changeup, split-finger fastball
and cut fastball -- most pitchers have just mastered two or three.
 But
it's another of his pitches that has the attention of fans: the
gyroball, a pitch thrown like a football that could have a mesmerizing
horizontal movement or could be baseball's Bigfoot.
If Matsuzaka throws the gyroball next season -- he told Yahoo!
Sports coyly he has thrown it, but "not too much, sometimes
accidentally" -- it would be the first new pitch to reach
the big leagues since Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter's split-finger
fastball in 1976.
It would also be the first pitch in Major League Baseball developed
not on the pitcher's mound but in the laboratory.
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Inventing
the gyroball |
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About six years ago, Japanese computer scientist Ryutaro Himeno
created the gyroball in computer simulations that modeled airflow
around spinning baseballs. He then shared his research with baseball
training manager Kazushi Tezuka.
All airborne baseballs have three forces acting on them: gravity,
which pulls the ball down; air resistance, which slows the ball;
and lift, which can nudge the ball up, down, left or right, depending
on the spin on the ball.
Most pitchers manipulate the lift force as they throw the ball.
A fastball, thrown primarily with backspin, appears to rise.
A curveball, thrown with topspin, sinks more than it would with
just gravity. A slider, thrown with sidespin, on a second axis,
moves or "breaks" horizontally.
 Himeno's
pitch creates a primary spin along a third axis. From a batter's
perspective, the ball spins clockwise or counterclockwise like
a football.
"I've never seen a slider like this," said Will Carroll,
a sports columnist at Baseball Prospectus who examined pictures
in one of Himeno's books describing the biomechanics of the gyroball.
Carroll says the pitch breaks late and sideways between 1.5 and
2 feet making it extremely difficult to hit.
"I've given up trying to convince people it's real. Now
I'm just going to show them."
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Learning
to throw the gyroball |
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"You're throwing the
ball like a football. Your hand is out on the side of it, much like
you would see a quarterback," Carroll explains.
 "For
a right-handed pitcher, the back of his hand is toward third base
at release. And instead of putting spin over the top like a curveball,
or backspin like a fastball, you're going to make it go sideways
like a spiral."
Carroll recently taught the pitch to 23-year-old financial consultant
and amateur league player Kyle Boddy.
Boddy is far from mastering the pitch, but said, "It's not
a miracle pitch; at the end of the day, it's another changeup
pitch."
Boddy says his gyroball has a downward break of about a foot,
and a sideways break of about 4 inches -- but only because he
throws the pitch at an angle and about 10 mph slower than his
fastball, allowing it more time to break.
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Theoretical
movement of gyroballs |
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Boddy's results are close
to those predicted by baseball physicists.
"It's easy to be fooled. ... I would trust people if they
said the pitch is breaking to the side one way or the other, but
how do you know that the pitch is a gyroball?" said Alan
Nathan, a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
who has gone as far as any American scientist in demystifying
the motion of the gyroball.
Though he has yet to see the pitch thrown, Nathan predicts the
sideways break should theoretically be much smaller than the slider.
 When
a "perfect" gyroball is thrown with spiral spin -- and
no topspin, backspin or sidespin -- Nathan argues that only two
of the three forces, gravity and air resistance, should affect
the ball's trajectory. The third force, lift, should cancel itself
out.
"So how does the ball know whether to break to the left
or to the right? It doesn't," he said.
Nathan contends that the perfect gyroball should look not like
a slider but like the knuckleball, another spin-free pitch.
The knuckleball takes an unpredictable flight path because asymmetric
air resistance forces, caused by the baseball's raised stitching,
can push the ball in almost any direction.
Nathan is similarly unsure what role the stitching could play
in the case of the gyroball.
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Planning
gyroball research |
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Nathan and his colleagues hope to have a better understanding
of what a gyroball could do in early 2007, when he hopes to have
studied the gyroball with high-speed cameras.
"It's just a matter of time till we have one of the gyroball
pitchers in my lab," said American Sports Medicine Institute
research director Glenn Fleisig, who works with major league teams
-- including Matsuzaka's Boston Red Sox.
But what does he think about Matsuzaka's gyroball?
"I'm looking forward to seeing one," Fleisig said.
--
By Adnaan Wasey, NewsHour Extra
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It's important to understand both sides in an election, and I think it will be interesting to hear the Republican opinion on big issues. As a writer, it will be my job to take that perspective and share it with the youth of the country, a crowd that mainly supports Obama.
