Wcws

[Greenmonsters]

There's nothing wrong with simply saying a pitch is low and inside or running away from the batter. If you can't identify 75% of pitches accurately, you are doing nothing but undermining your credibility IMO. Let's not even talk about 'late sharp break'

 

[obbay]

For what it is worth, when it comes to identifying pitches, I kind of defer to the Olympic gold medalist pitcher who is there watching it live vs. my opinion of the pitch based on TV coverage. I have no idea where their booth is and what angle they have but I know that the standard offset center field camera angle hides break vs a view from right behind the catcher. According to what I see from the center field angle, there is no such thing as a curve ball, but when I see the behind the catcher angle I can pick up curves easily.

Fair enough - good points.
My comment was criticizing only Michelle Smith (no other commentator). I have heard her say things that have contradicted other gold-medal olympians who have been able to back up their position with video where we are supposed to just take her word for it. She seems nice enough and competent, and its just my opinion but based on her late breaking riseball myth and other bedtime stories, I am skeptical of anything she offers. sorry.
FWIW- I don't listen to Mark McGwire either.

 

[RetiredCoach]

Fair enough - good points.
FWIW- I don't listen to Mark McGwire either.

Not even for doping advice?

 

[cuzmail]

it was a general response to a few posts in the thread by a few people, one saying the girls are recruited early and are throwers without movement. Some saying the announcers don't know what they are talking about and others saying the pitches are throwing bullet spin. They all fall into a general category of us watching at home know more that the pitchers/coaches/announcers so I grouped them together. You did not make all of the statements I was responding to.

OK. You quoted my post to reply to so that what generated my response.


I do find it a little hard to believe that they can see the spin of the ball from their vantage point up at the top of the stands. However, I never been in the booth so I can't say for sure. I can say that it's hard to argue with film that is unaltered or at least supposed to be. The slow motion shows what the ball is doing. Unless there is some type of film aliasing that I am not aware of, then I have to go with the film over Michelle.

Although MS has a very nice resume' it doesn't mean her words are absolute. Simply relying on her resume' as a gold medal Olympian to say that she is correct is a appeal to authority fallacy. Tending to take her word over mine because of her resume' is a different thing, but I simply ask you to review the slow motion video and see for yourself.

 

[SoCal_Dad]

The pitchers for these teams are recruited when they are in 8th grade based on the coach/scout assumption that they are going to be big, tall, and strong.

I agree with this as a general statement regarding early recruiting. However, the first of the 8th grade recruits I know about are entering college in the fall. Gourley verballed as a sophomore and Hawkins as a junior. Whom are you referencing?

After that the kids have immense pressure to throw hard and fast. There is too much on the line for them to take a step back, break down their mechanics, and learn to pitch "right" in order to maximize movement.

Yes, what I've seen is they get rushed up to top 18G/HS teams and consequently feel compelled to throw hard. Schools monitor them after committing and it seems like they should be looking at more than a radar gun. You'd think they would want to improve mechanical issues as early as possible.

 

[SoCal_Dad]

It's not like they're showing slo-mo replays on every pitch. Mostly it's on big hits, so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise if the spin wasn't optimum. Hitters at this level punish mistakes.

 

[starsnuffer]

The frame rate of a TV camera isn't going to let you see the spin of the ball accurately. You have to be present to win. If you're going off what you see on TV, you're just guessing.

-W

 

[chinamigarden]

Announcers have a few seconds to explain what just happened, the color person has even less time. How many casual viewers are going to sit around for long and listen to Michelle Smith (or anyone else) say, "She struck her out with that pitch that actually didn't rise but just fell at a slower rate then the fastball, which tricks the eye and the brain into thinking its going to drop faster then it did. Making it appear to go up at the last moment to the batter" The second pitch to the next batter would already be on the way by the time she said all that.

 

[WARRIORMIKE]

Michelle Smith is hot!

 

[Rocketech1]

Smith believes the ball is rising. It is only people on boards who want to argue the semantics of trajectory (ie, I threw the ball up with some spin or maybe no spin) over (the yes, annoying) 'late sharp break' (spin made it rise). However it got there, it went higher---or in or out or down. .

The point is that "sharp, late break" on a riseball is a fallacy. As Rick Pauly has shown us many times, his daughter's riseball flattens out about 15 feet before home plate. And she is a professional pitcher! Any one of the slo-mo replays that MS watches clearly shows NO late break and yet she perpetuates this fallacy over and over again. I think that is what irritates the original poster and I agree.