Baseball How Much I Love You

The Process/Mechanism Description I selected was pitching machines for the sport of baseball. Baseball is one of my favorite sports to play as I was growing up.  Baseball is America’s national pastime and has been around for over 100 years.  Baseball is probably one of the most difficult sports to play in the United States.  The reason being you have to hit a small ball which is "9 to 9.25 inches around and according to the rule book, a baseball must weigh at least 5 ounces and cannot exceed 5.25 ounces.  It has a rubber or cork center, wound in yarn and covered in white cowhide, with red stitching.  The idea of the sport of baseball is to hit the baseball which is being thrown near you to hit back towards what they call the pitcher.  The item you are using to hit this ball is called a bat. The bat is a hitting tool, traditionally made of a single, solid piece of wood. There are a few other materials that are now commonly used for nonprofessional games; such as an aluminum bat.  Generally bats are hard round sticks made of wood or metal and are about 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) in diameter at the hitting end, tapering to a narrower handle and culminating in a knob. Bats used by adults are typically around 32 to 34 inches in length and weigh somewhere around 29 to 31 ounces.  The game is very difficult.  It is a game when you hit the ball 30 percent of the time you are considered really well. Most people that have played the game or have grown up watching it call it a failing sport.  But because the sport of baseball is so difficult to play most people obviously need to take allot of practice hitting the ball. SO there was a genius of person out there that invented what is now commonly called a pitching machine. A pitching machine is a tool that is used by baseball players to improve their hitting skills so that they can improve in the game of baseball.  Pitching machines will help make ball players quicker and have a better eye when it comes to hitting.  Most if not of the machines are very lightweight, so they are easy to position in different areas. There are many different options and companies that make these pitching machines.  Pitching machines consist of many moving parts.  Generally pitching machines are made of some sort a strong aluminum or metal. Most of them two rubber wheels attached to the medal.  There are gears that look like watch or car gears to get the wheels spinning. Once the wheels are spinning a ball is loaded by pulleys into a shovel or arm looking thing and the hydraulics in the machine are used to propel the shovel or arm into motion. Sometimes the machines have to be hand fed. The movement is supposed to simulate a pitching motion. Speeds of the pitch will depend on how the machine is programmed.  Some machines can go as high as ninety miles per hour but most generally will go up to eighty miles per hour at max speed. The other type of machine which I like allot better is known as the wheel machine or Jugs Machine it was called when I was in college. The wheel pitching machines do not have an arm that simulates the pitching motion of a pitcher. Once the ball is fed into one of the wheels, either by hand or another feeding mechanism, the ball will be hurled toward the batter. There are two types of wheel machines; they are horizontal and vertical wheel machines. I find that both of these machines can simulate allot of different types of pitches, not all because it is nearly impossible to duplicate live pitching but it very close some times.  Now there are some machines that specifically throw curve balls, sliders and simulate pitches that move and those machines are called poly lite pitching machines.  Those machines generally use lite weight foam balls or wiffle balls to simulate hard to hit pitches. Because the balls are so lite they tend dip, dive, and spin all over the place.  So if you can hit these balls it much easier to hit off of a pitcher trying throw you something similar. The one thing with these machines that you must be cognoscente of is that since they are machines is that they need a power source or outlet for them to be plugged into or they will not work. Baseball is an amazing sport has been around since the eighteen hundreds.  But it is one of the most difficult sports to play and one of the hardest to really be good at.  But having a machine so that you can practice day in and day out is truly a blessing.  Trust me that if I had these types of machines when I was young and playing ball all the time I would have been a much better player all together. http://youtu.be/ykIdSolHg8k