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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2015 June 27

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June 27

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earned run average/pitching

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Are walks calculated in the pitchers E.R.A.? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.65.15.189 (talk) 07:50, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's complicated. For example, if a walk forces in a runner from third base, the run scored (usually) counts as an earned run for the pitcher who let that runner reach base via a hit or walk, but it's not an earned run if the baserunner reached on an error or if another error prevented the inning from ending before the run scored. The precise rules can be found in section 10.16 here. Deor (talk) 11:03, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
See earned run for more detail on what is and is not an earned run. The article explains the complicated rules for determining when an error results in an unearned run. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:44, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, sports is considered a form of entertainment, and sports questions may also be asked as the Entertainment Reference Desk. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:46, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The weight of a thrown ball

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If you throw a ping pong ball, it doesn't go very far because it's fairly light. A bowling ball doesn't go very far due to it being so heavy. Is there a measured sweet spot in between where a ball thrown by the hypothetical person who throws the ping pong and bowling balls will go furthest for that person? Basically, has anyone figured out what the best weight for a ball would be for the greatest distance?

I realize that there probably won't be one specific weight. That it will likely be a range. And that different people will be able to throw better or worse than other people. I'm just curious if this has been looked into at all. Thanks, Dismas|(talk) 09:21, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The reason that a ping pong ball won't go far isn't really its weight, but rather its large surface area in comparison to its weight. If a solid ball had the same weight as a ping pong ball and the same density as a bowling ball you'd be able to throw it much further than either of them. The ideal ball to throw is as dense as possible and just light enough that it doesn't impede the movement of your arm much. - Lindert (talk) 10:23, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think a ball of ping-pong weight would be affected too much by collision with air molecules to be optimum (though I can't prove my intuition). The best size and weight will vary slightly with the arm that throws it, but my guess is that it will be slightly smaller and denser than a cricket ball, perhaps down to golf-ball size, but heavier (the golf-ball record is around 150 yards). The surface of the ball makes a difference to the aerodynamics, and other shapes can be thrown further. See Aerobie. Dbfirs 12:20, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Your intuition probably relates to the fact that the ratio of surface area to mass increases with decreasing size, AOTBE: a grain of sand has a similar defect as a projectile to the ping-pong ball‘s, despite its much greater density. I think Lindert’s last sentence is on the right track: the “sweet spot“ will involve as heavy a ball as can be thrown with a full-speed arm motion, made of the densest practicable material. The first part would depend on the individual’s strength and technique. Someone strong enough to throw the bowling ball as fast as a fielder can throw a baseball could make it carry farther.—Odysseus1479 23:40, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
18 ounces. Re: The accuracy of throwing hand grenades. as a function of their weight, shape and size.--Aspro (talk) 17:09, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting, but there are a few caveats. First, because they were interested in grenades, they only tested three weights: 12, 18, and 24 ounces (340, 510, and 680 g): a lighter grenade would not have had sufficient power as a weapon. Second, they were not testing range as such, but accuracy when throwing the thing 30 yards (27 m) at a horizontal target. And third, the 12-ounce grenades landed on average nearer the bullseye while the 18-ounce ones, although more consistently thrown, tended to fall short. The report explains this by suggesting that the throwers were near their maximum range. (See the text on the page 7, which is PDF page 13; and the scatter plot on page 19, PDF page 25.) Taken together, this suggests that a lighter weight of ball might give yet greater range. A cricket ball is about 160 g, a baseball (ball) slightly less, a golf ball about 50 g. They might indeed have more range. --70.49.171.136 (talk) 21:59, 27 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm with 70.49.171.136 on this. I'd wager good money that, were there a scientific study into what size and weight of object was able to be thrown by a human being the longest distance, the "sweet spot" would indeed be an object of the size and weight of a cricket or baseball ball. Long history of trial and error, and so on. --Shirt58 (talk) 09:07, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That might be convincing if the only consideration in those sports was how far one can throw, but obviously safety and handling are also an issue. Things like the lead bullets that slingers used in ancient warfare (for much longer than baseball and cricket have existed) would be out of the question because of their deadliness and their inelasticity. These travelled several times the distance that baseball players can bat a ball. It is no coincidence that lead bullets continue to be the ammunition of choice in modern warfare. - Lindert (talk) 12:29, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think that you can usefully separate this out into two questions:
  1. What is the mass that an average human arm can accelerate to the greatest speed in a throw?
  2. What is the most aerodyamically efficient way to encapsulate that mass so as to minimise drag?
To resolve (1), we could use something like a water balloon that can be filled with varying amounts of water - and measure the velocity at which it leaves your hand in a throw and plot a graph of mass versus speed.
In (2), we want something that's a ball - so we're adding a constraint that it must be spherical - and that makes the answer easy - you want the densest material you can find. So wikipedians will immediately suggest that your ball contain neutron star material or something - that would give you the least drag - but in practical terms, the ball would be too small to find...let alone throw! So a ball made of a less dense material like (perhaps)_Osmium - which is still quite a bit denser than gold. Osmium is 22 times denser than water - so an osmium sphere would have about 4.7 times less surface area than a water balloon of the same mass. Since the drag force is proportional to the area, you'd have 4.7 times less drag force. Since F=ma, the rate of deceleration would also be 4.7 times smaller.
It might turn out that the osmium sphere might be hard to grip, or perhaps too small for convenient throwing, so we might want to opt for a less dense material on those grounds - but if the thrower is permitted to wear a glove of some kind, then that issue can be fixed in the glove, not in the ball.
Unfortunately, osmium oxidizes in the air to make an exceedingly poisonous substance that passes easily through the skin - so tossing osmium balls around is likely to be a serious health risk. A thin coating of some kind should fix that issue. Since the coating increases the diameter and reduces the mean density, it too should be of a dense material - so I'm thinking that a thin layer of Iridium should be applied to an osmium ball for the absolute best aerodynamics. However, going with an Iridium ball to start with would probably be a saner decision since Iridium is very nearly as dense as Osmium and is not toxic to humans.
So the remaining question is what that optimum mass is. The studies quoted above were interested in precision of throwing as well as distance - and the argument that cricket and baseball balls have 'evolved' to be optimum ignores the fact that in those sports, precision is at least as important as speed. But our question here is only about distance - so if a ball could be hurled further, but with no accuracy whatever, it's unlikely that a cricket/baseball is the answer. Notably, to get the best distance, you need to throw the ball at a high trajectory - which would be a highly inadvisable thing to do in those games. So I reject the notion that cricket and baseballs are anywhere close to being the optimum for distance.
It's actually kinda tricky to figure out the optimum throwing angle because there is a clear trade-off. At a high trajectory, the ball has to be released before the thrower's arm has finished its motion - so you're losing the additional acceleration that the muscles could have been imparting between the high trajectory release point and the horizontal release point. So it's likely that choosing a somewhat lower trajectory would impart more distance than the aerodynamically obvious release point...and that might also influence the optimum mass for the ball.
So my conclusion is that the ball should be made of iridium-coated osmium - but the mass you should use is hard to predict without experiments - and will inevitably change depending on who is doing the throwing and how much practice they get. With the right throwing angle and the correct mass, I'd bet you could throw it ten times as far as a cricket ball.
A complicating factor is that I've been talking about the distance to the first contact with the ground. If you wanted to consider the point where the ball finally comes to rest after much bouncing and rolling - then things get WAY more complicated. An iridium/osmium ball might well splat into the ground and stop without bouncing - where a lighter, bouncier ball would continue to bounce on for a vastly longer distance. But on a hard, smooth surface the answer would be different. So then everything depends on the nature of the surface that you're throwing it at...and that's unspecified in the question.
SteveBaker (talk) 15:41, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Quibble: you appear to have taken the square root of 22 in comparing the surfaces of water and osmium spheres, but the factor should rather be 22⅔ or about 7.9.—Odysseus1479 21:53, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hum... ( picture steam coming out of my ears ): Just to be pedantic: One does not ever-never throw cricket ball – the umpire would hold his arm out horizontally and declare no ball if you ever did. One bowls a cricket ball (in the hope of making the batsman’s eyes water by delivering a well aimed shot at his middle wicket. Hitting a stump is not nearly so so satisfying. Yet it is still cricket). (I do not know how to translate that reply into American English since here, only school girls play baseball (which they call rounders, because I suppose, that like most girls they seem to keep running round and round). Base ball is another mystifying puzzle to me that our American cousins pursue ;¬ ) --Aspro (talk) 16:36, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In an effort to decode & debunk Aspro's statement, there is a specific meaning of the word "throw" that's only used in the game of cricket (and closely related sports) and it means "Of a bowler, to deliver the ball illegally by straightening the bowling arm during delivery.". The everyday meaning of the word "throw" is "To hurl; to cause an object to move rapidly through the air." - which is most certainly what the bowler is doing whether he/she legally or illegally 'bowls' it. So this distinction is only relevant if one is discussing what a bowler does in the context of a game of cricket. If I throw a cricket ball for my dog to fetch...I throw it...irrespective of whether I happen to do so in the manner of a legal cricketing maneuver or in any other manner of my choosing. Hence Aspro is 100% incorrect about one "not ever-never" throwing a cricket ball. I throw them all the time. Hence this isn't a matter of mere pedantry. Aspro is just plain wrong. Even the best cricketer in the world can throw a cricket ball if he or she so chooses - and the mere fact that there is a rule in the game that provides penalties for those who do so suggests that cricketers most certainly do "throw" the ball from time to time. SteveBaker (talk) 19:55, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
then it is just a doggy toy. not a ball in a game of cricket (unless your doggy can swing a six and bat it out of the boundary) ! --Aspro (talk) 20:12, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Usually scientists are the culprits who redefine common words to have some narrow meaning, then tell every who continues to use the original meaning they are wrong. For example, "family". StuRat (talk) 18:34, 30 June 2015 (UTC) [reply]
...which elegantly defeats the suggestion that Shirt58 made about cricket and baseballs having been made optimal for distance throwing...if that were the case then we'd be playing those games with golf balls instead. Incidentally, the record for the longest throw of any un-powered object was with a boomerang...427 meters...so there is room for improvement! SteveBaker (talk) 19:39, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
A boomerang grenade sounds like a great idea. Has anyone patented it?--Aspro (talk) 20:17, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Those things make regular appearances on WP:ANI. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:09, 28 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
"I'd wager good money": and I'd have lost that good money. 
"two countries separated by a common language": That would the UK and USA, and not my native tongue redolent of the convict stain. This reminds me of the alarmingly sensible style manual of a government department I used to work for. Its answer to the question "should I use British or American spelling" was "yes, you should use British or American spelling."
@Aspro: does that mean an Overthrow (cricket) should be moved to Overtoss (cricket)?
Tenuously on topic: field hockey balls were historically just cricket balls painted white. In another shockingly sensible decision, the International Hockey Federation decided they must be white. Or that they could any colour at all, and of any composition at all, as long as they met the size and weight requirements. Since 1990 or some such date, field hockey balls have dimples on them like golf balls, even though they stay mainly on the ground during play. Can it be thrown further than a baseball or cricket ball? I wouldn't have a clue. In my long and dubious tenure as the skipper of a royal blue and black z-grade field hockey team, my main captainly concern was watching the car-park and hoping we could get eleven men and women on the field before the game started. If a Latvian javelin athlete had turned up, I would have paid the $AUD 20 VHA registration fee myself, given him my spare hockey stick and selected him as centre-forward.
--Shirt58 (talk) 12:00, 29 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't found the study (yet), but I referenced a study in another paper that is relevant. They studied energy transfer from a throwing mechanism to the object thrown and supported the obvious answer: The mass of the throwing object should be identical to the mass of the object being thrown. It is complicated in humans because we can't easily work out the "mass of the throwing object". It isn't just the mass of your hand. Your arm does some work. You shoulder gets into it. Your hip should swivel a bit. But, in general, that explains why energy transfer from a hand that is huge compared to a light-weight ping-pong ball is just as poor as energy transfer from a hand to a massive bowling ball. I will keep checking during breaks today and, hopefully, find it. 199.15.144.250 (talk) 12:03, 29 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The "body English" certainly has an impact on a throw. You can bowl a cricket ball a lot harder with that running start than you could if you had to do it from a fixed position. I saw a TV show a while back that discussed paper airplanes, and the guy who set a record for the longest paper airplane throw on a level surface, well over 100 feet. Plenty of body English in the throw. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:12, 29 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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