抄録
The spin of a pitched baseball affects the ball trajectory which relates to pitchers' performance. We investigated the relationship between the motion of the fingers and the spin rate of pitched baseball. Five professional and three collegiate pitchers participated in this study. The motions of ball, hand and fingers during the ball release were recorded by 3 high-speed video cameras. We defined the amount of angle that the fingers actually rotated the ball as "back spin angle". The ball spin rate was correlated to 1) the amount of extension at PIP joint of the index finger (p<0.05) and the middle finger (p<0.01) and 2) the back spin angle (p<0.01). These results suggest that delaying the ball release is an effective way to increase the ball spin rate, but pitchers are limited to change their timing of the ball release since the timing also determines the projection angle. We concluded that ball spin rate, ball velocity and ball spin axis angle are interrelated with each other under the restriction of throwing the ball into the strike zone.
