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  • Title: The rising fastball: baseball's impossible pitch.
    Author: McBeath MK.
    Journal: Perception; 1990; 19(4):545-52. PubMed ID: 2096372.
    Abstract:
    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.
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