Matthew Monday, Analysis of Four Baseballs

Toward the end of August, I brought Matthew into work with me, and we had a task to analyze four different baseballs.  It seems like there are some claims in the baseball world that the current baseball is different from the ones in the past.  This year they are obliterating the record for the number of homeruns and pitchers are complaining that the baseball has changed.  Matthew and I wanted to closely analyze four different baseballs that we had that span the recent past.  Since we have some highly accurate instruments at work, we took it as a little project on a slow day in the summer.

So here’s what we did.  We had four baseballs.  They are listed under the column “Type.”  (1) Identified as the 2015 Major League ball autographed by Henry Urrutia.  (2) Second is new 2019 major league ball that was thrown to Matthew by Juan Soto at a game we went to in July.  Third is a ball I caught at batting practice at an Arizona Diamondbacks game some 15 years ago, roughly dated to 2004.  Fourth is a new 2019 ball from a minor league game this August, from Single A New York-Penn league. 

Here is a picture showing the four baseballs, with Matthew’s face as background. 

The balls are arranged from left to right in the way I list them in the paragraph above.  Visually, other than a slight discoloration for the 2004 ball, probably from age, the balls all look alike.

So we took the weight of the balls, the diameter of the balls (in two places), the width of the seams in several places, and the height of the seams in several places.  Let me preface that this is a very small sample size.  We could be led astray from a particularity of an individual ball.  But my hunch is that the conclusions we reach are pretty much true.

We took the weight of the balls on a very accurate scale which measured pounds to three decimal places.  See Table 1 below.  What is remarkable is that all three major league balls weighed exactly the same to the thousandth of a pound.  That is incredibly consistent.  Even the minor league ball was only 6 thousandths of a pound more.  Baseballs all weigh the same and just under a third of a pound or just over five ounces.  

Baseball Type	Weight (lbs)
2015 “Urrutia” Major League Ball	0.318
2019 “Juan Soto” Major League Ball	0.318
2004 Arizona Diamondbacks Major League Ball	0.318
2019 NY-Penn Single A Minor League Ball	0.324

Table 1

We also measured the diameter of the balls in millimeters using digital Vernier calipers, and here we did it in two places. Holding the close part of the seams up, we measured the diameter from the top to underneath, noted in Table 2 below.  Then we flipped the ball 90 degrees so that the wide part of the seams was up and measured that diameter, noted in column E.  Here is two interesting finds.  First off the two diameters for each ball were very close indicating the balls are very round.  Second, the two 2019 balls were all over 73 mm, the 2004 ball was almost two millimeters smaller.  The minor league ball was in between the two.  We conclude that the newer balls are slightly larger.

Baseball Type	Diam (Close)	Diam (Far)
2015 “Urrutia” Major League Ball	73.83	73.82
2019 “Juan Soto” Major League Ball	73.21	73.29
2004 Arizona Diamondbacks Major League Ball	71.77	71.59
2019 NY-Penn Single A Minor League Ball	72.39	72.31

Table 2, Units in MM

If you don’t know what Vernier Calipers are, you can read about them here.  

Here’s another conclusion, and this runs counter to conventional thinking.  Since the old balls are smaller but weigh the same, they are denser.  Matthew even said he could feel the old one being harder. 

Because Justin Verlander complained about the seams, we measured the seam width and the seam height.  Measuring the seam width was not difficult.  We stuck the tips of the calipers in the holes the threading makes.  We took four random measurements around the ball.  The average and standard deviation are listed in Table 3 below.

Baseball Type	Seam Width (Ave)	Seam Width (Std Dev)
2015 “Urrutia” Major League Ball	7.89	0.469
2019 “Juan Soto” Major League Ball	7.23	0.863
2004 Arizona Diamondbacks Major League Ball	6.95	0.349
2019 NY-Penn Single A Minor League Ball	8.50	0.179

Table 3, Units in MM

Measuring the height of the threads we used the depth gage part of the caliper, put it into a thread hole and measured the height to the top of the thread.  I’m not sure how precise this was, but we did see a stark difference, so the trend was probably true though the numbers might not be precise.  Again we took four readings around the ball for each ball.  Results are listed in Table 4 below.

Baseball Type	Seam Height (Ave)	Seam Height (Std Dev)
2015 “Urrutia” Major League Ball	0.86	0.361
2019 “Juan Soto” Major League Ball	0.84	0.113
2004 Arizona Diamondbacks Major League Ball	1.07	0.024
2019 NY-Penn Single A Minor League Ball	0.92	0.212

Table 4, Units in MM

Some conclusions on the seams.  There really wasn’t that much of a difference between the 2015 and 2019 balls.  But there was a difference between the 2004 and the newer balls.  Newer balls had wider seams than the old.  The minor league ball much wider.  The height of the new balls was some 20% smaller than the old.  Verlander is right.  The seams are lower on the new balls.  So the old ball had a narrower seam but taller than the new.  Also the standard deviations of the old ball were better, which means it was better manufactured.  The stitching process of the newer balls appears to be poorer, maybe to save money.

So here’s a list of all the conclusions:

1. New balls are slightly larger than previous but weigh the same.

2. Old ball is harder (denser) than the new.

3. The width of the seams on the new balls are wider.

4. The height of the seams on the old are higher.

5. The new balls are not as well put together as the old.

Does this all indicate the new ball travels farther?  One of the theories out there is that the lower seams on the new balls cause less drag when in flight.  I guess that’s true but how much I don’t know how to figure out.  Intuitively it doesn’t seem to me it would make that much of a difference.  But Verlander is right about the height difference. 

I would think the lower height on the newer balls might make it harder to spin off a breaking ball.  But then would the extra width of the seams on the newer balls help the pitcher spin it?  You would have to ask a pitcher which seam he would prefer.

Since the old ball were denser, you would think they were the more “juiced up” ball.  But I think the slightly larger new balls make it easier to see and hit. 

So do the new balls go further?  I don’t know, but this was a fascinating study.  Both Matthew and I learned a lot, and I got Matthew to see how some basic engineering analysis is performed.  He got to learn about weighing to three decimal places, measuring with Vernier Calipers, some basic statistics, tabulating in Excel spreadsheet, and drawing conclusions from data.  I hope you got something out of this too.

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing

July 20^th, 1969.  I do remember that day. I was seven years old and the family was all gathered in front of our black and white TV set with the rabbit ears. It was awesome and made a lasting impression on me. I attribute that to me wanting to be and ultimately becoming a mechanical engineer. Ever see the mission control pictures of the engineers in the white shirts and ties? I wanted to be those guys. Well, first I wanted to be an astronaut, who by the way we’re mostly engineers too, but second those guys.  When I realized I get motion sickness, any dream of being an astronaut vanished.  And while I didn’t work in the space industry, I’ve loved my career as an engineer. 

Here is a nice little documentary, perhaps the best of the various documentaries put out today.

Apollo 11 is probably the greatest engineering achievement in human history. 

Blog Note: I Haven’t Forgotten my Blog

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted.  No I haven’t forgotten.  There have been a number of things that have limited my posting.

First, I’ve gotten a new major project at work, and the start of a major project is labor intense for the project manager.  Once I’ve gotten things rolled into a plan and I’ve got good people working toward that plan, I can go into a more monitor mode.  Until then there are budgets to be put together, funding to be broken out, designs that need to be drawn up, plans that need to be established, contracts that need to be written and sent over to legal, and endless engineering documents to be composed that ensure good engineering process.  Hopefully I can take a step back in a couple of months.  In the meantime, I’m still working the project I was on before, which has become a pain.  So I’m doubly busy.

Second, baseball season!  I’m obsessed with my beloved Baltimore Orioles.  They had a disastrous first month of the season, possibly the worst start in team history.  You would think I would give up after that kind of start.  No, I’m only more obsessed.  I’m convinced this is a good team that had injuries and bad luck, and will bounce back.  It seems like they are finally returning to norm.  They’ve now won six of the last seven, including a 17-1 win yesterday.  However, in a division where the Yankees (I call them the “Stinkees”) and the Red Sox (I call them the “Red Pox”) are off to incredible starts, it does seem that the hole the Orioles dug that first month will be too deep to climb out.  We shall see.  Anyway, when I come home, my first order of business after a tiring day at work and after Matthew runs me ragged with whatever he wants me to do before he goes to bed is to turn on that night’s game.  Baseball is such a joyful pastime, even if your team is underperforming.   

Third, The Catholic Thought Book has been reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.  It’s been a bit slow for me, not because it’s not a good read—it’s fascinating actually—but because I was burnt out from the long list of reads the month before.  Also, although I’ve taken copious notes, I’m really not sure what I want to say about, or, perhaps more accurately, not sure on how to go about saying something on it.  I’m about two thirds of the way through (the rest of the club has finished) and I still intend to post something on it.  All those notes can’t go to waste.

Here’s what the book club is onto now, if you want to join in or follow my blog posts.  Currently we have as a short two-three week read of Pope Paul VI’s famous papal encyclical Humanae Vitae.  It’s the 50 year anniversary of this enormously important document which confirmed Catholic teaching on reproduction and marital relations.  It stands as a contrast to the sexual revolution that was swirling in the air in 1968 when it was written and published.  It’s not a very long document, only 17 pages.  It won’t take you long to read, and you can read it here from Vatican documents.  I will definitely have a couple of posts on it.

The short read is to fill the time gap while we vote, select, and acquire our next book.  The winner for the next read is The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, by Robert Cardinal Sarah, one of the cardinals who are on a short list for the next pope.  Everyone who I know who has read this book has raved about it.  I have a friend, Mary Sue, who is a very devout Evangelical Protestant, and she said this in her Goodreads review of this book:

This book moved me. Every once in a while, I come across a book that makes me want to reevaluate everything I know, and this book did that. I absolutely loved the recognition I felt reading this book - despite standing in quite a different corner of Christianity as a young, American, fairly Calvinist woman compared to an established and revered African Catholic cardinal, I could identify many (not all, but many) of Cardinal Sarah's reflections and understandings as ones I've shared and come to love with all my heart. More importantly, he put into words things I've felt so deeply it hurts about the quality of silence and solitude I've loved desperately as a believer. I've not even known that these things could be put into words, but Cardinal Sarah did that.

I don’t know what she is referring to when she says that the book made her “reevaluate everything [she] knows” but that is quite a statement.  I will have to ask her to explain once I have read the book myself.  So if that doesn’t get you to want to read this book, then you have no Catholic blood in your veins.  (I kid.)   By the way, Mary Sue has commented occasionally on my blog and she keeps her own blog, At the Still Point.  This week the Book Club is acquiring the book, next week we start reading, and the week after we discuss the opening sections.  Hope that motivates you. 

Nice to be blogging again.  Bless you all that read these humble posts.

Personal Note & Music Tuesday: O Holy Night by Katie Melua

I’m alive.  Being home for the holidays you would think I would have more time to blog, but alas no.  The older my son gets, the more time from me he demands and both being home the last week he really insists we do things together.  I did get him a construction project  for us to do together for Christmas.  It’s Mindware’s STEM Newton'sLaws Engineering Kit.    

It’s pretty neat, and on our first project, a dragster car, either we did something wrong or there’s a mistake in the procedures.  Well, I’ll figure it out.  I am an engineer with 31 years of experience.  I would be forever embarrassed if I couldn’t figure it out.  I guess this could be the engineering version of “Are You Smarter than an Eight Year Old.” 

The other thing that’s taking my time is my mother.  Last note I included here she was still in the Rehab/Nursing home.  She was discharged on the day before Christmas Eve.  Her hip is doing great!  She was outstanding in physical therapy and other than Tylenol she has not needed any more pain medicine.  Two minor issues came up.  A urinary flow issue and a stomach reflux issue.  Both issues were there to begin with, but undergoing the operation may have exacerbated them.  She just needs to follow up with some specialists.  Physical therapist is coming to the house a few times a week, but he doesn’t think she’s going to need much more.

What I’ve missed is to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  I hope it was all special for you and blessed.  I'm not sure if I’ve never posted “O Holy Night” before.  It has become my favorite Christmas carol.  I could listen to it all day long.  And I came across this singer I had never heard of before, Katie Melua. From what I understand she’s somewhat well known.  It’s me that’s pop culture ignorant.  Melua is a British young lady but an immigrant from the country Georgia.  She went back to her country to make this album, In Winter, and on it there are a couple of beautiful songs in her native Georgian language.  Backing her on “O Holy Night” and on other songs is a choir from her native land, Gori Women's Choir.  I hop you enjoy it.

Lines I Wished I’d Written: How the Cat Works

I have not been reading much this whole summer.  I’ve gotten lazy and the evenings are taken up with following baseball, my sports love.  But I have been reading the ASPCA Complete Guide to Cats, and found an interesting and well written chapter titled, “How the Cat Works.”  I’ll post some parts of the chapter, subsection’s title which I put in bold.

How the Cat Works

In the words of Leonardo da Vinci, “the smallest feline is a masterpiece.”  The cat is one of nature’s most elegant examples of form following function.  The design of the feline physique is perfectly suited to a predatory carnivore’s needs: detecting, pursuing, catching, killing, eating, and digesting prey.  In fact, the cat’s basic form has changed relatively little since wildcats first appeared some 30 million years ago.  The many species that now inhabit the world’s jungles forests, deserts, couches, and armchairs all follow the same basic blueprint.  Although most domestic shorthairs aren’t likely to catch anything more exotic than a few extra hours of sleep, today’s pet cat is built very much like its wild relatives.

Framework: Bones and Muscles

As any cat owner knows simply by watching, the cat is built for grace, flexibility, and power.  From a sitting start, it can jump up to nine times its own height.  It can make its chest and shoulders narrower, to squeeze through almost impossible tight spaces.  It can sleep curled into the shape of a letter O and, immediately upon awakening, stretch and form an inverted C, pressing the chest almost to the floor.

Sinuous Spine

Where does the cat get its remarkable elasticity, both in motion and at rest?  The first place to look is the animal’s spine.  Because cats’ vertebrae are flexibly connected and have particularly elastic cushioning disks between them, the feline spine is extremely supple.  A cat’s ability to right itself in midair so that it can land on its feet and to make rapid changes in direction while pursuing or capturing prey are both made possible by the flexibility of its spine. 

The flexibility of the cat’s spine also contributes to its fluidity and speed as a runner.  To reach top speed—about thirty miles an hour—a domestic cat depends on its spine as much as its feet and leg muscles.  When running, cats can lengthen their stride, and thus increase their speed, by alternately extending and flexing their vertical column.  When the cat’s feet push off to start a new stride—the claws serving as spikes for traction—the cat’s body stretches to its maximum length.  The cat’s running style thus resembles a series of elongated jumps or bounds.  The cat increases its speed by lengthening its stride with each bound, until every stride carries it about three times the length of its own body.  Many other mammals, especially humans, rely on a more pistonlike sprinting style, in which the key factor is how often the feet make contact with the ground.

Stretching and Squeezing

Another special feature that contributes to feline flexibility is the tiny, rudimentary collarbone, which helps cats lengthen their stride when sprinting by allowing them to extend their forelegs fully.  The lack of a long, anchored collarbone (as humans have) gives cats the ability to squeeze through tight openings by literally compressing themselves to fit the available space.  Moreover, the feline shoulder blade is attached to the rest of the body only by muscles, not bone.  This gives the shoulder blade tremendous freedom to move as the cat moves, enhancing the cat’s flexibility and grace and extending its long running stride. 

Legs and Toes

Whether running or walking, cats land on their toes.  Such digitigrade locomotion is the hallmark of a sprinter.  Animals that land on their full soles of their feet, using plantigrade locomotion, are better suited to sustain exertion.  Bears and humans, for example, have a plantigrade footfall.  Cats hunt using great bursts of speed (after which they often end up panting). 

The spring in a cat’s legs is phenomenal, thanks in part to the construction of its hip, knee, and ankle joints.  These joints have very little give from side to side.  They are very stable and strong and can withstand great force applied in one direction: forward.  When the cat’s hind leg muscles contract, the three joints extend in an instant, giving the animal enormous thrust to carry it either high or far.  The cat’s landing is cushioned by the thick pads on its feet, and by the bones of its feet and wrists, whose intricate construction makes a stable two-point landing on its forepaws possible. 

Explosive Power

One look at a cat in profiler provides an obvious clue as to why cats are such marvelous, explosive athletes.  In proportion to its overall body size, a cat’s hindleg muscles are enormous, as is its “launching pad,” an exceptionally long rear foot.  These anatomical features translate into tremendous power and mechanical advantage when a cat springs or leaps.

The cat’s particular type of athleticism may also come partly from many “fast-twitch-fatiguing” cells contained in its skeletal muscles.  As their names suggest, these cells produce explosive movement, but they use up their energy stores in a flash and tire easily—as does the cat, which has relatively few “slow-twitch” fibers to give it endurance.

Energy Conservation

Because cats lack the staying power of plantigrade long-distance runners, conserving energy is a must for them.  Even the way a cat walks can save energy, as the contralateral gait cats sometimes use—left hindfoot moving more or less in tandem with the right forefoot, and right hindfoot moving with the left forefoot—is mechanically very efficient.

The best energy-saving strategy, of course, is to stay put, and cats are masters at it.  Their brain chemistry makes it possible for them to spend more of their time asleep than awak.

Lightning Fast Nerves

When cats are awake, an intricate network of nerves radiating from the brain and the spinal cord operates in high gear, receiving and transmitting information and governing sensations, reflexes, and motor functions throughout the cat’s body.  The lightning speed at which the cat’s nervous system operates is illustrated by the well-known feline “righting reflex.”  Thanks to this and its remarkable flexible spine, a cat held feet upward and dropped will have its feet pointed downward, ready to land, before it has fallen twenty-four inches.

Dexterity

A cat’s wrist bones and their associated tendons and ligaments give the cat a measure of manual dexterity—not close to matching our own, or even a raccoon’s but enough to enable the cat to get mice out of hiding places (or food out its dish) with a handlike scooping motion and to hold onto trees.  This ability to pronate the wrist (carpus)—turn the bottom of the paw toward the midline of the body—is not common in the animal kingdom.  But then, neither are most creatures as graceful and nimble, yet powerful, as cats.

That’s enough for now.  Isn’t that fascinating?  It reminds me of an engineering project, only thing God being the engineer. 

Let me end this with a recent picture of Tiger, here sitting on the windowsill.  That sill is a good three feet off the ground and he makes a smooth calculated leap onto that less than two inch ledge. 

Isn't he a handsome kitten?  He's four months old now, and that picture was snapped three weeks ago.  I had to put a stop to him going on that ledge.  Early one morning, while the birds were chirping out there in the trees, he climbed up the window screen to the top.  It’s a good thing the screen didn’t fall out.

Personal Essay: Raising the Bayonne Bridge

New York City has lots of bridges, 2000 according toWikipedia,  but they must be counting fallen trees across flooded side streets because that’s way more than even I imagined.  2000?  Well, there are many and some of them are some of the most impressive spans in the world.  We are composed of islands, and we are over 8 million in population in the city with another 25 million in the suburbs, depending how you count suburbs.   A lot of people have to move about and cross lots of water: the Hudson River, the East River, the New York Harbor, the Long Island Sound, and the Kill van Kull.   

I live on Staten Island,  the most remote of the five boroughs of New York City, and we have four major bridges that connect us to the outside world, three bridges that connect us to New Jersey, and one that connects us to Brooklyn.  The Kill Van Kull is a channel that separates us from Bayonne, New Jersey, and as you can imagine a lot of shipping goes through that channel.  Spanning the channel is the Bayonne Bridge (they never name anything after Staten Island), which on certain times of the year I can see the top from my bedroom window.  I think it’s in the winter time that the trusses of the arch becomes visible, when the leaves are off the trees and I have an unobstructed view.  I’ve never considered the Bayonne Bridge to be aesthetically beautiful, so I’ve never thought much of being able to see it.  Houses on Staten Island that have views of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge are very expensive; view of the Bayonne Bridge does nothing for my home value.

Apparently they will be building cargo ships well beyond current size.  They are currently huge, so what they will be building is like the largest mammal set side by side to a dinosaur.  Super container ships will be the transport vehicle of choice, as soon as they can build them.  This has caused ports around the world to modify their ports to accommodate these super vessels.  Dredging bottoms, widening harbors, building accommodating structures for loading and unloading are some of the projects going on for the sake of improving logistics.  You can read about that here. 

They have dredged parts of New York Harbor, either for this reason or just for some sort of maintenance.  But to really accommodate these super container ships, they will have to raise the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge.  The current clearance must interfere with the tops of these super containers.  So instead of tearing down the bridge, they will build the roadway above the current roadway, and then take down the old roadway, so that in the end there will be more clearance for the super ships.  

Does that sound interesting?  Absolutely!  As an engineer, that really piques my interest.  Building on top of an existing bridge is way more complicated and difficult than building one from scratch, or at least intuitively it would seem that way.  Here’s a video of the project plan.  It’s breathtaking.   

 

I wonder what the cost savings are for building on top rather than building from scratch.  That’s some heck of a project.  I’m a mechanical engineer, but projects like that might have swayed me back in college into being a civil engineer.  I would love to manage that project.  When they are into it, I’ll be sure to go by the bridge and take some pictures.  

Now one thing I don’t understand is how tall are these super ships?  From the movie clip it looks like there is plenty of vertical clearance.  However when I looked up the dimensions of the bridge, it claims there is only 14 ft (4.3m) clearance.  Fourteen feet to the water level?  That’s not even two stories.  It’s got to be higher than that.  It looks way higher than two stories when I’m driving on it.  

One last thing.  I work in New Jersey and though we (my carpool) don’t regularly take the Bayonne Bridge, we might switch to it on occasion when traffic at the Goethals Bridge is jammed.  We’ve decided that while this project is going on, we’ll suffer with the traffic and avoid the Bayonne.  A project that complex has got to have something go awry.  It will be a miracle if they execute the entire project flawlessly.  I hate to be the car under the beam that falls.

Matthew Monday: Truck Heaven

I've been tied up with work lately and it's not going to get better.  I have a very important review (perhaps life and death of the project) scheduled for Thursday.  Those kind of reviews bring on a lot of stress, especially when you don't have good news to tell.  I'm also going to have to see if I can reschedule for the following week since I don't have all the information I need for a proper review.  That's only going to add an additional week of uncertainty, which is more stress.  Engineering is a stressful occupation. 

Which in a odd way ties in to today's outing.  There are two skills that I perceive that Matthew seems to have.  Since I don't have any other experience with children, I don't know if Matthew excels at them or he's just normal.  One is music; he just seems to have a great recall for the melody of a song, and he'll even create his own lyrics to common children's songs.  The second is a mechanical ability.  He's watched me assemble household items and can put things together himself if their simple, and he loves cars, trucks, trains, his pedal wagon, his bicycle.  He's always asking to drive my car, and I've put him behind the wheel with the car in park, and he plays with the steering wheel, the windshield wipers, the blinkers, the power windows.  He's fascinated by the mechanical devices.

Today they had a "Touch A Truck" day at the local ball field.  It was an collection of real trucks, and children were able to climb in, sit at the driver's seat, and play with the various trucks.  They had them all: steamrollers, garbage truck, cement mixer, fire engine, ambulance, dump truck, police van, backhoe, and so on.  There must have been one version of every kind of truck.  Well Matthew was in seventh heaven.  He loved every single second of it.  I think we have a budding mechanical engineer here.  He could not get enough.  Let me share some pictures.

Here he is in a backhoe with a plastic hard hat.

 

I don't know which truck this is, perhaps the dump truck, but he's certainly trying to do something...lol.

 He really enjoyed the cement mixer.  It had an air horn and it was really loud. 

Inside a military truck.

And finally he's really trying to start this antique delivery truck.

He's my little boy!