Posted by: BMill (brumil2@hotmail.com) on Tue Jul 19 06:50:08 2005

There seems to be plenty of studies and gadgets to check ball speed at the plate but I would like to see some studies and figures on the de-acceleration of the ball as it approaches the batter. I am assuming that the pitched ball achieves it's fastest speed the instant it leaves the finger tips and de-accelerates the rest of the way to the plate. Is it possible that pitchers with the same plate speed could have different de-acceleration rates, thus making it harder to hit one over the other? Could this explain the difference between hitting fastpitch softball and a baseball?