Learning the ropes...

Baseball, to me is a strange sport, it is what most Australians just call simple cricket you stand still and hit a ball that is thrown to you and then try and make it to first base. Batting I think is the part of baseball I understand, see the ball hit the ball, find a gap or clear the fence. As a bowler in cricket you would expect pitching to make more sense to me but it doesn't. I understand how some of the pitches work but others just baffle me.

The craziest thing I find is the speed of pitches it is ridiculously fast. The world record for a ball in cricket is 100.2 MPH (Yes I did have to google the conversions be thankful I am being nice to you imperials.) this is 161.3 KM/H, this is extremely rare to see someone break the 100 MPH barrier in cricket, where it seems to happen a lot more often in Baseball.

Next thing I wish I knew more about is the amount of pitches and how they get the ball to move in different ways in the air, a cricket ball moves in the air in two different ways, Swing and Drift. Swing is a reaction to the cricket ball flying through the air as one side is continuously polished using the players clothing, sweat and saliva however the other side is left to be roughed up. This then causes uneven airflow on each side of the ball causing the ball to move towards the rough side of the ball. Drift is mainly done by spin bowlers, who put a lot of revolutions on the ball up to figures of 2100 RPM. This causes the ball to move slightly in the air and can also cause it to dip, which is fall slightly faster than expected.

Then I don't understand pitching rotation I went to a baseball game once, and the coach just randomly walks on to the field and just drags the pitcher off the ground. Can this be done anytime and what is the reasoning for this, is it just he is performing shit? Also if a pitcher gets dragged can he come back on. Bowling changes in cricket are an essential part of strategy and making sure you have fresh bowlers on is always good but you might find that a particular bowler is very good against a batter. Do you try and have match ups in baseball like when their 2nd Baseman is up to bat we should always put on Timmy cause the 2nd Baseman can't pick his curveball or something?

When I watch videos of Baseball pitchers getting the ball to move in crazy ways I have always wanted to try and copy and learn from that to see if there was anyway of being able to use them in a game of cricket.

Also whilst I am writing about the things I don't understand about baseball, with a batter, do they position where they want to hit it or is everyone rocking up to the plate wanting a home run. In cricket as you don't have strikes you can play defensive and not play the balls you don't want to and wait for a ball you like. Is this the same in baseball I realise you only get the 3 strikes and 4 balls but are people getting struck out because there wasn't a pitch they liked. Also are players coming up to the plate and wanting to pop it just over short stop into the gap in left and centre field cause they know they can get on base easy?

Okay sorry for my stupid questions but I am trying to learn baseball a little.

To be fair, it's quite rare for pitchers to break 100 MPH. Sure, it happened more than crickets but it's still a rare feat. A lot of the pitchers are on the 95+- range.

As for pitches, you can dig up baseball pitches type, but yeah, they do fly in all kind of trajectory. They hold the baseball in different grip and the ball rotates differently in the air to provide different kind of movement. There are a shit ton of pitching video on Youtube if you want to see them in action and in a more scientific way.

The typical pitching setup is you have starters to start game. Starters are the best pitchers of the league with a good arsenal. Closer are also some of the best pitchers of the league, but they might lack a highly variable arsenal, so they are used to close the game. Pitching 1 inning, having 2-3 pitches are enough but starters you want to have more so you can be unpredictable throughout multiple innings. The lower tier pitchers are the relievers, who are there to eat the innings in not-so-important timeframe of a game. So, usually you let your starter pitches as long as possible. The best scenario is to have your starter pitches all 9 innings and everyone be happy, but that don't always happen. Sometime your starters get rocked early on, sometime your starters pitch way too many against some good pitchers who are very patient and protect the plate well. In those situations, you will have to drag the starter out and shove in a reliever. There are different reliever roles too. In a close game, you put your best middle reliever or setup depending on the inning; in a blowout of either way, you just put your inning-eater kind of reliever to eat innings and let your starter/good pitchers rest. There are also specialists which is kind of like the matchup you said. For instance, a left-handed specialist is a pitcher who is an expert in killing any LHB, and you put him in against a good LHB to give yourself the highest odd of getting him out. But it's tougher to do now with the newly implemented 3 batters rule. Now a pitcher have to face at least 3 batters or finish an inning, so it's tougher to do a "I am going to hit just this one batter with the specialist" move unless it's the final out. Or the specialist will need to pitch more.

The batter's objective depends a tad bit based on their style and role in the batting lineup. There are power hitters who are trying to blast the ball through the roof and there are contact hitters who are trying to get a hit and get on base. There are also the patient type who will work pitch count and happy to pound on a mistake, whether it is a base on ball or a good hit off a bad pitch. You don't want to hit a groundball in baseball. You want a line drive(which is like a "flat, middle-high" ball that soars over the infielder and land on the outfield for a good hit or a gigantic smash to outside the wall. Nowadays with all the science and numbers, one thing that the batters care a lot nowaday is launching angle, which is the angle of the ball leaving the bat post-contact. Nowadays they are trying to whack the ball higher than long time ago in which produces more line drive and home run. We are also in a power batting era so people are trying to hit for power more than usual. It's not easy to manipulate the landing spot of the ball, like you want to hit into the gap, but that's much easier to say than done. That's why they focus on launching angle, cuz a good line drive is one of the hardest ball to catch on. This means the likelyhood of the ball dropping on the ground and you getting a hit is much higher. A good line drive is flat and quick, so the infielder will have a hard time react and actually grab it(infield over-head catch is highlight-worthy most of the time) and the outfielders have very limited time to get to the spot and field it due to the low air time. If it drops short, it's still a single. If it lands on the wall, then it's a double or more.

Picking a pitch they like is one thing, but sometime you want to just swing when you see a good pitch. It's harder to do than say though, and they get Ked because they just miss. Like they do predict the pitch type and where it would land(it's even a feature in MLB The Show), but it's fucking hard to react.

Here's a link breaking down some of the more common pitches. Generally speaking, most pitches fot into three primary categories: Fastballs, Breaking Balls, and Change-Ups. Fastballs are the ones that go the fastest but tend to have little movement or change in direction. Breaking balls tend to be a bit slower but have a drastic change in direction just before they reach the batter. Change-Ups tend to look like Fastballs or other pitches but are significantly slower to throw off the hitter (i.e. if you're throwing 150 km/h, you switch to something 120 km/h and the hitter swings way too early and gets poor contact). Then there's the Knuckleball which tends to be slow and just does whatever the heck it wants.

In baseball, once a player is taken out of the game, they cannot go back in (I think there's a rule where if you run out of players and someone gets hurt, the cacther can come back, but that's about it). Typically that means once you're removed from pitching you're done for the day, but very rarely the manager will instead take out one of the fielders and stick the old pitcher at like first base for a batter or two while someone else pitches. In this case, since he was still in the game, he could go back to pitching after.

Berocka wrote:Swing is a reaction to the cricket ball flying through the air as one side is continuously polished using the players clothing, sweat and saliva however the other side is left to be roughed up. This then causes uneven airflow on each side of the ball causing the ball to move towards the rough side of the ball. Drift is mainly done by spin bowlers, who put a lot of revolutions on the ball up to figures of 2100 RPM. This causes the ball to move slightly in the air and can also cause it to dip, which is fall slightly faster than expected.

Swing is illegal in baseball. There's a pitch called a spitball that's pretty much what you're describing (it was banned in the 1920s after a player named Ray Chapman died after being hit in the head by a spitball pitcher; however, there's a lot of speculation that that was just used as an excuse by people who were already against it). Pitchers have been guilty of rubbing spit, pine tar, dirt, everything else on the ball to get it to move, as well as purposely grinding the ball in the dirt or keeping a razor blade hidden somewhere in their uniform to mess up the surface of the ball. It's uncommon, but every once in a while someone will get busted for cheating (the batting equivalent is drilling a hole in the bat and filling it with cork to make it lighter, which is the first clip in that video).

Drift is basically how all baseball pitches move. Curveballs and sliders are usually the most common, though split-fingered fastballs or sinkers spin and move differently. There's a weird pitch called a knuckleball that is thrown to spin as little as possible and doesn't have any predictable movement--making it as hard to catch as it is to hit.