gigglingone strikes out in debut. A's get shutout for the 12th time this season.

I really cant say anything at all without you attaching all these weird sentiments that simply are not true.

Yes, your hatred of me is wholly unnecessary, and after this post, if you did go away, I would not say anything, because I did JUST admit it was a little weak of me. But, you always chose to ignore the parts where I admit fault and instead concentrate on the most tiny negative aspect. Like I said, I can never do right in your eyes.

I mean, yes I said something I shouldnt have that I didnt think anyone would catch or care enough to make a big deal about (oops forgot I was dealing with mikev and flashfire), then I owned up to it and admitted it was weak, yet am still being lamblasted and ganged up on. That’s when you get victim-speak. I acknowledged I was wrong and weak…what the fuck more do you want?

And for the record, I didn’t bring up dhewhocannotbenamedfa, but holy hell do I know now never to mention him again ever on this site. POINT TAKEN. Sheesh.

I hope you get to feeling better and are able to get to sleep soon]

1. (and by far most important in this list) I wish you a speedy recovery and hope everything goes well.

2. Telling you that your brain plays tricks on you and that your eyes deceive you is not an insult. It’s a fact. So do mine and the eyes of everybody else out there. One needs nothing more to realize that than to look at the few optical illusions drawings or to see an illusionist at work. People who are really good at visual evaluation do not deny that fact, they embrace it and work on incorporating that fact in their analysis methods. So, if you have trained yourself in baseball analysis you can separate the things that seem and things that are better than the most of us. Since I can’t, I need help.

3. This is not “stats vs. eyeballs”. First of all, we are not talking about baseball stats here, but rather of physical measurements and the laws of physics. Both seem to be at odds with what your eyes tell you and strongly indicate that a sinker will have the virtually same movement regardless whether it is thrown belt high or knee high. I find nothing wrong in pointing it out, especially as this specific data that I have compiled can not be found anywhere else on the web. Everybody is free to decide how much weight they will put in it and how much in what your eyes or their own eyes tell them.

4. Even though you might be better trained in watching baseball then the rest of us are, there is still a difference in how you see things and how batters do. I do not think you can equate the two, especially on this one. You see majority of the pitches from a view that center field camera provides – this view does not exist in real life. The rest you will see from the stands, but none of them the way a real batter does. So, no matter how trained your eye may be, it has never seen a 90mph sinker come in at the belt and it has never seen a 90mph sinker come in at the knees. You just don’t know which one seems to be moving more to the batters, you just know which one seems to be moving more to you.

5. I do not think that it is stupid or dumb to use science when we want to enhance our knowledge of baseball and, quite frankly, I find your remark insulting. (But, unlike the other recent ones that you directed my way, this one gets a hernia-adjusted pass). Why would it ever be stupid to know more? Why would it be dumb to know that a sinker movement is virtually the same regardless of the height? Once we learn that, we can still say that for whatever reason it seems or does not seem different to the batters (if it indeed does), but at least we know something we didn’t know before.

I’ve dedicated a good portion of my life intentionally training my eyes and brain to be especially worthy of regard when it comes to baseball observation. So you pretty much hit on my biggest pet peeve there.

You seem to consistently try to set yourself up as some sort of expert on baseball. Why in the world should anyone consider you one?

Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?

but at least you get to walk like an old man for 2 weeks

Different precisions apply to different situations. I, too, find the stairs example and what our mind is capable of amazing, but it has nothing to do with this example.

I think you are confusing path and movement. The path gets more parallel to the ground the higher you throw the ball (well, to the certain point, but we are not talking Ricky Vaughn here). This has nothing to do with the pitch being called flat.

A flat fastball is the one that moves on a straight line )or close to it). It doesn’t matter if that straight line is pointed at the bottom of the strike zone, at the top of it or at the batter’s butt. If the line is straight, the pitch is flat. If it’s not, the pitch has movement.