Pitch Simulator

The Pitch Simulator applet will let you experiment with different velocity, angles, rotations per minute (rpm), and pitches and see how they appear either from the side or from the top. After pressing the start button below, enter values for velocity, horizontal angle, vertical angle, and rpm, and select the desired pitch and view. Then press start/restart to watch the ball take flight. The horizontal angle is the angle in the horizontal axis and vertical angle is angle along the vertical axis. So if you enter -5 for the vertical angle, the ball will be thrown down 5 degrees. Press start/restart again to try again. You can press the pause/resume button at any time in the flight to stop the ball. If the display should become garbled or you wish to clear the previous paths, simply press the clear button. Press quit at any time to close the window.

Here are some of the things you should observe:

• Try throwing different pitches and notice how much the ball's height decrease. The fastball's height should fall significantly less than other pitches.
• If you are a baseball player, you might have notice a big break of a curveball while playing. Try throwing a curveball, it should drop sharply.
• Try using different angles...To throw to the lower right corner of the batting box, choose a positive value for the horizontal angle and negative value for the vertical angle.
• When you play around with angles, you don't have to use large values, even small angles will change the trajectory of a ball significantly. This shows how much of a fine art pitching is.