Entries Tagged 'baseball' ↓

Athletes are getting stronger all the time, thanks to scientific conditioning, and records keep falling. But the velocity of a baseball thrown really, really hard has not changed all that much since Walter Johnson’s days. 100 m.p.h., and maybe as much as 3 m.p.h. more, is as fast as anyone can throw it.

According to this article, that is close to the human limit. Muscles can indeed get bigger and stronger, which is why athletes can run, swim, and jump better than ever before. But throwing a baseball has to do not only with muscles but with ligaments and tendons. Those do not get stronger as muscles do, no matter how many steroids you take. Powerful muscle exertion can snap, tear, and over stretch them like rubber bands. The article says that throwing a ball 110 m.p.h. would be about the very most a human arm could take.

Well, the official record is 103, so there is room for a new flamethrower to throw even harder, before he blows out his arm.

Hell is freezing over: The Milwaukee Brewers are 6-2. Democrats are the ones getting charged with racism and sexism. Liberals and conservatives seem to be agreeing on something, namely, China.

Do you see any similar unlikely events that may portend apocalypse?

when hope springs eternal in the human breast, as everyone’s team begins in first place. I stayed up late watching the Washington Nationals in their new stadium play the Atlanta Braves. It was a good game that the Nats won in the last inning when Ryan Zimmerman hit a walk off home run. My resolution this year is to try to follow and be for the Nationals, since I now live in the D.C. area and feel a community obligation to support the local team. I’ll still pull for the Milwaukee Brewers, but I will watch Nats games on TV, check their box scores every day, and go to some games if I can get tickets (which, I am told, may not be easy in this first year of a new stadium).

So the floor is now open for optimistic predictions. ESPN pundits were predicting that the Cubs would be in the World Series! Don’t I hear that every year?

It wasn’t just Barry Bonds taking steroids. It was also Roger Clemens. And also a host of all-stars, many of whom are still playing: Tejada, Gagne, Lo Duco. So reveals Major League Baseball’s investigation of steroid use, whose report was just released. See this story for the grim details: Steroid Report Names Star Players - washingtonpost.com. The names that were named were hardly comprehensive. If the stars were doing it, you just know the mid-level and low-level players who desperately wanted to be stars were doing it.

Fans don’t like Barry Bonds all that much anyway because of his obnoxious attitude, so they have come down hard on the slugger who smashed so many beloved records. But fans love Roger Clemens! I predict the “everybody was doing it” defense may actually work. Maybe we should just put an asterix by the whole “steroid era” and go from there.

Well, the Colorado Rockies were STILL blessed to come as far as they did, even though the Red Sox swept them in the World Series. (This is a reminder too that God’s blessings are to be found in the Cross, not in Glory.) Nevertheless, the Rockies will be greeted by their hometown fans as heroes and their season will become part of the team’s legend.

When a team makes the World Series but loses, the home city (unless it is New York) usually feels pretty good anyway. The Brewers lost in their only trip to the series in 1982, but that didn’t really seem to matter so much. But when the Packers lost in the Superbowl to the Denver Broncos (a rematch being tonight on Monday Night Football), the whole state of Wisconsin was in an agony of depression, to the point that it seemed better not to get into the big game at all than to be there but to lose.

This is another example of how baseball and football have a different ethos. (No time limit vs. the pressure of the clock; rain delays vs. play no matter what nature does; relaxation vs. excitement; making contact with the ball vs. making contact with the player. . . .What else?)