Looks fast, feels faster - why the speed gun is only part of the story

Data on release points and trajectory are helping to break down the mysteries of why some bowlers are harder to face than others writes Cameron Ponsonby in Cricinfo

Shubman Gill ducks a Pat Cummins bouncer during India's Test tour of Australia in 2020-21 AFP/Getty Images
 
 


South Africa's Andrew Hall is on strike against Brett Lee at the Wanderers stadium in Johannesburg. The ball is bowled and Hall tucks it into the leg side before setting off for a gentle single.

As he jogs to the other end he hears a belated cheer from the crowd. Confused, he looks around to see the big screen displaying an announcement. He has just faced the fastest ball ever to have been bowled at the Wanderers.

Still confused, Hall's eyes move from the screen to Lee and they trade a quizzical look: "There's no way that was that quick."

The next ball, Lee runs in and bowls a bouncer to Gary Kirsten that flies past his face. Lee and Hall catch each other's eye once more,

"That one was."

You see, the speed gun is the movie adaptation of your favourite book. Yes, it tells the story. But it doesn't tell the full one.

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"A lot of what makes Test players special happens before the ball comes out of a bowler's hand."

Those are the words of England analyst Nathan Leamon, speaking on Jarrod Kimber's Red Inker podcast. As a starting point, it shines a light on one of the limitations of the speed gun. It only tells us how fast a ball is at the point of release and tells us nothing about what has happened before or what happens after.

And what happens before is crucial. It is very easy to think of facing fast bowling as primarily a reactive skill. In fact, read any article on quick bowling and it will invariably say you only have 0.4 seconds to react to a 90mph delivery.

But what does that mean? No one can compute information in 0.4 seconds. It's beyond our realm of thinking in the same way that looking out of an aeroplane window doesn't give you vertigo because you're simply too high up for your brain to process it.

However, the reason it's possible is because, whilst you may only have 0.4 seconds to react, you have a lot longer than that to plan. And the best in the world plan exceptionally well.

Hall describes a training method that South Africa would use in order to be able to associate a bowler's release point with length. After a ball was bowled, they'd walk down the wicket and place a cone or mark a spot with their bat where they believed the ball had landed. The coach would confirm it or correct what the player thought.

The idea is in essence basic trigonometry. Over time, you learn to associate that if a bowler releases the ball with his arm at 12 o'clock, the delivery would be full. If he releases the ball at 1 o'clock, it would be short. It's a process designed to consciously train the subconscious, and Jacques Kallis was the best at it.

"Whether he played and missed," Hall says, "or left it, or ducked out the way, he'd be able to come down the track and isolate a rough area of where that ball had landed. And the reason he was so good at it is he became really sharp at picking up length and he made some bowlers look slower because of that. Because as they let go of the ball, he knew within a couple of inches where it was going to land."


Jasprit Bumrah roars after having Joe Root caught in the slips AFP/Getty Images



There are a number of pre-delivery cues that Hall, as an international player, would be looking out for. Some were obvious tells, such as a bowler running in that bit harder before bowling a bouncer; others more subtle, like a bowler's head falling away in their action so they were able to push the ball into the batter and bowl an inswinger.

These cues weren't restricted to fast bowlers either. When talking about how to face Muthiah Muralidaran, Hall explains that one of the cues the South Africans would look out for was where his right elbow would be pointing as he entered his delivery stride. If it was pointing out at 90 degrees with his hand by his ear lobe, that was the sign that Muralitharan was going to bowl his off-spinner. If his elbow was pointing down towards the batter, it was probably a doosra coming up.

"You still wouldn't be able to play it half the time," Hall adds, "but you had an idea."

And some bowlers give you more of these cues than others, meaning a bowler at 87mph may feel quicker than one at 90mph if they give the batter fewer clues in their action.

Mark Ramprakash spoke of this when comparing his experience of facing Lee and Jason Gillespie in the 2001 Ashes. Lee was the faster bowler of the two, but his textbook action, with the ball always in sight, meant that Ramprakash felt he could consistently time his pre-delivery movement. But when he faced Gillespie, despite his being slower on the speed gun, it felt quicker. And this was because Gillespie would appear almost to release the ball before he'd really landed on the ground, throwing off Ramprakash's timings. When facing Lee, Ramprakash was planning. But when he was facing Gillespie, he was reacting.

In simple terms, there's a correlation between a bowler being "different" and the feeling that they are faster than they actually are. Batters are brought up on a diet of right-arm-over bowling that is released from nigh-on the same area, ball after ball after ball. Remove that familiarity, and the feeling of speed goes up.

In the Caribbean in 2019, TV showed Jasprit Bumrah's release point was half a metre closer to the batter than Kemar Roach's. This gave Bumrah the effect of bowling 3.7mph faster than the speed gun was showing

"Take Lasith Malinga," Hall says. "If you've not faced him before, you're literally going 'what am I supposed to watch?' But you soon get told, when he gets into his action, to watch the umpire's chest and neck. If you're watching his arm, you're struggling. And that's why in the beginning he'd clean people up and they'd say 'ah, he's quick'. He's not that quick. You just couldn't follow the ball."

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Another quirk of how we consider pace is that by measuring the speed at which a ball is released, we're not actually measuring how long it takes to reach the batter. And there's a difference.

For instance, if you set up a bowling machine at 85mph and deliver three balls in a row, one of which is a full toss, the second a good length delivery and the third a bouncer, each of the three balls will reach the other end in a different amount of time because when the ball hits the pitch, it slows down. And the steeper that impact is, the more it will slow. So counterintuitively, the bouncer, cricket's scariest delivery, is actually the slowest of the three, whereas the full toss, cricket's worst delivery, is the fastest.

But what we don't know is how different bowlers compare to each other in terms of how much pace they lose off the wicket. The information is out there, but it's just not readily available. Angus Reid from VirtualEye - the company that provides ball-tracking data for Test matches in Australia - recalls how, during Naseem Shah's Test debut for Pakistan, they did a piece for broadcast comparing how he and Australia's Pat Cummins were releasing the ball at very similar speeds, but Shah was reaching the batter faster due to a combination of his height, ball trajectory and "skiddy" nature.


Steven Smith was pinned by a Jofra Archer bouncer at Lord's in 2019 Getty Images


And we know from player anecdotes that these things matter. Hall explains how bowlers will sometimes bowl their bouncer with a cross-seam in the hope that the ball lands on the lacquer and loses less pace when it pitches. It is the same notion that Joe Root expressed earlier this year when he said India's spinner Axar Patel was beating England for pace in the pink-ball Test at Ahmedabad, because the skid off the lacquer gave the feeling that the ball was "gathering pace" off the wicket.

Conversely, many bowlers are said to bowl a "heavy ball", whereby batters feel that the ball is "hitting the bat harder" than expected. One such bowler was New Zealand bowler Iain O'Brien, who believes this was a consequence of the ball kicking up off the pitch and striking the blade higher than anticipated, due to more backspin being imparted upon release. Such was the backspin that Andrew Flintoff imparted on the ball, in the lead up to the 2005 Ashes he was accused of chucking as his wrist would snap so dramatically at the point of delivery.

This is one of the difficulties of trying to express the feeling of speed to a wider audience. For the spectator, it's merely a number because we have no other frame of reference. But for the batter, it's an experience. A moment in time that is almost over before it's begun.

One former international cricketer laughed when asked whether he would check the speed gun after facing a delivery. "Why would I need the speed gun to tell me if a ball was fast? I was the one who just faced it."

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The final piece of the puzzle concerns the ball's release point.

When India were touring the Caribbean in 2019, TV showed an overlay of Jasprit Bumrah's release point compared to Kemar Roach's, demonstrating that Bumrah was bowling the ball half a metre closer to the batter than Roach. Some quick maths showed that this gave Bumrah the effect of bowling 3.7mph faster than the speed gun was showing. Cricket has long been played on a pitch that is 22 yards. Bumrah plays on one that is 21.5.

Admittedly, this advantage was spotted because Bumrah is on the extreme, gazillion-jointed end of the scale, enabling him to bowl closer than anyone else in a way that other bowlers can't. But given we pay attention to how wide on the crease a bowler will bowl and also how high a bowler's release point is, surely we should know how close a bowler is bowling to the batter, given it is the single easiest way of apparently increasing pace.

This effect is measured in baseball. In fact, everything is. While cricket shrugs its shoulders and says "I guess we'll never know, folks" for a myriad of data-points, every intangible detail in baseball is known and measured.

How close a pitcher releases the ball to a batter is known as "Extension" and translates to what's known as "Perceived Velocity". Famed pitching coach Tom House believes that, if you can throw the ball one foot closer to the batter, then it equals an extra 3mph for the person at the other end. Tyler Glasnow and Luis Castillo are two pitchers who both throw their fast-ball at 97mph. Glasnow's extension is one of the best in the league and Castillo's is one of the worst. As a result, Glasnow feels like he is throwing at 99mph and Castillo feels like he is throwing at 95mph.Spin rates, which could resolve cricket's heavy-ball phenomenon, are a hugely important measurement in baseball - so much so that they can now be taken into consideration in the selection process.

Even the ultimate intangible, the impact an action has on a batter before the ball has been released, is beginning to be quantified by a biomechanics company known as ProPlayAI, who have started tracking what they call a "deception metric", which measures the amount of time a batter has to see the ball in a pitcher's hand before release.


Mitchell Johnson was ferociously quick during the 2013-14 Ashes Getty Images



The culmination of all these factors comes in the form of a pitcher named Yusemeiro Petit, described by baseball writer Ben Lindbergh as "the poster boy for the power of deception".

Petit's average fast-ball is 87mph. A whole 7mph slower than the rest of the league. He is 37 years old and over 500 games into his career. And he has made it this far, not by being a force of nature but by representing the mystery of it. He is one of those alien fishes at the bottom of the ocean that has lived forever and we don't know why.

In the 2005 edition of the Prospect Handbook, Baseball America, which is the sport's annual guide on the young players to look out for, Petit was described as leaving "batters and scouts scratching their heads ... Nothing about it [his fast-ball] appears to be exceptional - except how hitters never seem to get a good swing against it."

Fast forward to the present day and the reasons for Petit's success are beginning to be decoded. Simply put, Lindbergh describes him as a "hider and a strider". Throwing the ball far closer to home plate than would be expected and giving the batter little to no sight of the ball in the process. The result of which is a pitcher who is far quicker than the speed gun would lead you to believe.

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All of this isn't to say that the speed gun is useless. It isn't. But it represents different things to different people. As a broadcasting tool, it's an excellent way of telling a story in a bite-size chunk. And for a bowler, it represents the result of their process. Get everything right and watch that number go up.

For batters, however, it represents part of the process that leads to their result. Yes, the speed of a ball upon release is important. But we know that there are other factors at play, because the players at the receiving end of it say so. And ultimately, who would you rather face? A bowler that a machine says is fast? Or one that a human says feels even faster?

The Expert

 

We need the state now more than ever. But our belief in it has gone

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian



 

Illustration by Nicola Jennings


I left the Royal Court theatre a few days ago, feeling as though the writer had been rifling through my and other reporters’ notebooks. In Wish List, Katherine Soper has pinned down a theme central to today’s politics – but one I’ve yet to see in print or hear from an MP. To grasp it is to understand much of what drives support for both Brexit and Trump – and just why this is such a hostile climate for the left, be it in the form of Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.

Zero-hours workers '£1,000 worse off a year' than employees



At the centre of the play is a 19-year-old whose life is already over. Tamsin Carmody’s mother has died, leaving her in charge of the family. That means looking after her brother, Dean, who has been almost broken by poor mental health. When things get too much, he’ll press his hand on to a burning hob.

To scrape by, Tamsin works on zero hours in a giant distribution warehouse, packing strawberry lube, Meat Loaf albums, bottles of gin. The grim details of how the 21st-century British labourer has been reduced to cheap commodity are all here: the work boots that leave Tamsin’s feet clenched balls of pain, the countless paper cuts from folding cardboard that never get time to heal, the pleading for more work each morning. Some of this derives from Soper’s own experience. The 25-year-old has done her own zero-hours stint in a packing plant where, after calling in sick for a shift, she turned up the next day only to be ordered home: she had already been replaced.

Then there’s Dean. The government reckons he’s fit for work, despite his inability to face strangers or venture out in daylight. He loses his disability benefits, and has to enact the farce of assembling a CV and applying over and over again for jobs he won’t get and could never hold down.

And here is where a play does what a newspaper can’t and a politician won’t: the siblings’ lives are laid side by side, and the state is revealed to be just as callous, unanswerable and punitive as the employer.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Erin Doherty (Tamsin Carmody) and Joseph Quinn (Dean Carmody) in Wish List. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Tamsin can’t meet her impossible targets of packing 400 items an hour; Dean is in no state to fill in all his job applications. Tamsin’s boss shrugs that he’s following orders: “They just get the numbers in the red and they work out how to put them in the black.” Dean’s health assessor and welfare adviser are in the pay of a government following a busted austerity strategy that relies on cutting off money to the poor.

Both have to struggle through tick-boxes, euphemistic nonsense (Tamsin’s warehouse is a “fulfilment centre”; Dean’s disabilities make him “fit for work”) and a system that grabs a lot while giving a pittance.

We’re often told that the state and the market have entirely different roles. But meet any number of the people paying the price for Britain’s crash, and you’ll see that they play almost identical parts using similar language and similar bureaucracy. And far from protecting low-paid workers from the depredations of the market, the state wants to hurl more people into it under the pretence that they are shirkers.

None of this fits with how social democrats view the state. Having attended my fair share of Labour and other leftwing political meetings, I know that a staple feature is that some grey-haired man in a jumper will leap up towards the end and launch into a good-hearted defence of the state. Public investment, social security, industrial strategy: all will circle back to the state; all will be met with murmurs of approval.


This has happened without the pundits and politicians noticing

And all are a million miles away from the experiences I regularly hear while reporting. I think about Lisa Chapman in Northamptonshire frantically searching the internet in the small hours to protect the benefits of her husband, who has Parkinson’s. A few days after my trip to the theatre I saw a presentation from the head of a local Citizens Advice. One of the PowerPoint slides read: “For some people, there is no safety net any more.” There was a time, she explained, when if someone walked in penniless she could get on the blower and shout, and scream and get them some money from somewhere. Now? That was almost impossible.

And I think of the valleys of south Wales, and the replies I got when asking what would make things better in one of the poorest parts of western Europe. No one mentioned the government, either in Cardiff or in Westminster. When I mentioned the G-word – in this place, where Thatcher shut the mines while Labour just relied on its voters to carry on being good little sheep – the response was usually laughter.

At the end of 2015, a team of academics held a series of two-day discussions with small groups of members of the public across Europe. They were asked only one big question: what should the government do for your children’s generation? Of all the countries, the British were easily the most pessimistic about what could be done – behind even Slovenia.

The British liked the NHS and pensions, but thought both would be gone in a generation. They didn’t talk about the good things that could be done by government. Trade unions came up just once in the entire two days. “I found it quite shocking,” recalls Peter Taylor-Gooby, of the University of Kent. “Of all the groups we interviewed, the British had this mood of resigned, reluctant individualism.”

Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan claimed the nine most terrifying in the English language were: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” He said it was a joke; it turned out to be a prophecy. Three decades of both right and left privatising, outsourcing and deregulating have shrunk the public imagination about what their representatives in government can achieve. Put that alongside the shattering of the working class, the smashing of trade unions, and the diminishment of so many other social institutions.

The need for the state and collective action hasn’t diminished, but the public belief in it has gone. The state is now either invisible or hostile. This has happened without the pundits and politicians noticing, but its consequences could shape politics for decades.

After Dean has received his latest brown envelope, Tamsin turns to him and begins a vow. “We’re gonna make it without them. OK? Fuck them … we can do this ourselves. We can – I can work, and …” Her voice breaks. “This isn’t fucking fair. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t.

“I’m so fucking tired.”

How I bought drugs from 'dark net' – it's just like Amazon run by cartels

Last week the FBI arrested Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of Silk Road, a site on the 'dark net' where visitors could buy drugs at the click of a mouse. Though Dread – aka Ross Ulbricht – earned millions, was he really driven by America's anti-state libertarian philosophy?

• 
• • Carole Cadwalladr
  • The Observer, Sunday 6 October 2013

The FBI alleges Ross Ulbricht ran the vast underground drug marketplace Silk Road for more than two years. Photograph: theguardian.com

Dear FBI agents, my name is Carole Cadwalladr and in February this year I was asked to investigate the so-called "dark net" for a feature in this newspaper. I downloaded Tor on to my computer, the anonymous browser developed by the US navy, Googled "Silk Roaddrugs" and then cut and pasted this link http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion/ into the address field.

And bingo! There it was: Silk Road, the site, which until the FBI closed it down on Thursday and arrested a 29-year-old American in San Francisco, was the web's most notorious marketplace.

The "dark net" or the "deep web", the hidden part of the internet invisible to Google, might sound like a murky, inaccessible underworld but the reality is that it's right there, a click away, at the end of your mouse. It took me about 10 minutes of Googling and downloading to find and access the site on that February morning, and yet arriving at the home page of Silk Road was like stumbling into a parallel universe, a universe where eBay had been taken over by international drug cartels and Amazon offers a choice of books, DVDS and hallucinogens.

Drugs are just another market, and on Silk Road it was a market laid bare, differentiated by price, quality, point of origin, supposed effects and lavish user reviews. There were categories for "cannabis", "dissociatives", "ecstasy", "opioids", "prescription", "psychedelics", "stimulants" and, my favourite, "precursors". (If you've watched Breaking Bad, you'll know that's the stuff you need to make certain drugs and which Walt has to hold up trains and rob factories to find. Or, had he known about Silk Road, clicked a link on his browser.)

And, just like eBay, there were star ratings for sellers, detailed feedback, customer service assurances, an escrow system and a busy forum in which users posted helpful tips. I looked on the UK cannabis forum, which had 30,000 postings, and a vendor called JesusOfRave was recommended. He had 100% feedback, promised "stealth" packaging and boasted excellent customer reviews: "The level of customer care you go to often makes me forget that this is an illegal drug market," said one.

JesusOfRave boasted on his profile: "Working with UK distributors, importers and producers to source quality, we run a tight ship and aim to get your order out same or next day. This tight ship also refers to our attitude to your and our privacy. We have been doing this for a long time … been playing with encryption since 0BC and rebelling against the State for just as long."

And so, federal agents, though I'm sure you know this already, not least because the Guardian revealed on Friday that the National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ have successfully cracked Tor on occasion, I ordered "1g of Manali Charras [cannabis] (free UK delivery)", costing 1.16 bitcoins (the cryptocurrency then worth around £15). I used a false name with my own address, and two days later an envelope arrived at my door with an address in Bethnal Green Road, east London, on the return label and a small vacuum-packed package inside: a small lump of dope.

It's still sitting in its original envelope in the drawer of my desk. I got a bit stumped with my dark net story, put it on hold and became more interested in the wonderful world of cryptocurrencies as the value of bitcoins soared over the next few months (the 1.5 bitcoins I'd bought for £20 were worth £300 at one point this spring).

Just under a month ago I was intrigued to see that Forbes magazine had managed to get an interview with "Dread Pirate Roberts", the site's administrator. And then, last week, came the news that Dread Pirate Roberts was 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, a University of Texas physics graduate who, according to the FBI's documents, had not just run the site – which it alleges earned him $80m in commission – but had hired a contract killer for $80,000 to rub out an employee who had tried to blackmail him.

If that sounds far-fetched, papers filed last Thursday show that he tried to take a contract on a second person. The documents showed that the FBI had access to Silk Road's servers from July, and that the contract killer Ulbricht had thought he'd hired was a federal agent. It's an astonishing, preposterous end to what was an astonishing, preposterous site, though the papers show that while the crime might have been hi-tech, cracking it was a matter of old-fashioned, painstaking detective work.

Except, of course, that it's not the end of it. There are two other similar websites already up and running – Sheep and Black Market Reloaded – which have both seen a dramatic uplift in users in the last few days, and others will surely follow. Because what Silk Road did for drugs was what eBay did for secondhand goods, and Airbnb has done for accommodation: it created a viable trust system that benefited both buyers and sellers.

Nicholas Christin, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who conducted six months of research into the site, said that what surprised him most was how "normal" it was. "To me, the most surprising thing was how normal, when you set aside the goods being sold, the whole market appears to be," he said. And, while many people would be alarmed at the prospect of their teenagers buying drugs online, Silk Road was a whole lot more professional, regulated and controlled than buying drugs offline.

What's apparent from Dread Pirate Roberts's interview with Forbes and comments he made on the site's forum is that the motivation behind the site does not seem to have been making money (though clearly it did: an estimated $1.2bn), or a belief that drugs hold the key to some sort of mystical self-fulfillment, but that the state has no right to interfere in the lives of individuals. One of the details that enabled the FBI to track Ulbricht was the fact that he "favourited" several clips from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian Alabama-based thinktank devoted to furthering what is known as the Austrian school of economics. Years later, Dread Pirate Roberts would cite the same theory on Silk Road's forum.

"What we're doing isn't about scoring drugs or 'sticking it to the man'," said Dread Pirate Roberts in the Forbes interview. "It's about standing up for our rights as human beings and refusing to submit when we've done no wrong."

And it's this that is possibly the most interesting aspect of the story. Because, while Edward Snowden's and the Guardian's revelations about the NSA have shown how all-encompassing the state's surveillance has become, a counterculture movement of digital activists espousing the importance of freedom, individualism and the right to a private life beyond the state's control is also rapidly gaining traction.

It's the philosophy behind innovations as diverse as the 3D printed gun and sites as mainstream as PayPal, and its proponents are young, computer-savvy idealists with the digital skills to invent new ways of circumventing the encroaching power of the state.

Ulbricht certainly doesn't seem to have been living the life you imagine of a criminal overlord. He lived in a shared apartment. If he had millions stashed away somewhere, he certainly doesn't seem to have been spending it on high-performance cars and penthouses.

His LinkedIn page, while possibly not the best arena for self-expression for a man being hunted by the FBI, demonstrates that his beliefs are grounded in libertarian ideology: "I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind," he wrote. "The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments … the best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed … to that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a firsthand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."

Silk Road, it turns out, might have been that world. Anybody who has seen All the President's Men knows that, when it comes to criminality, the answer has always been to "follow the money". But in the age of bitcoin, that's of a different order of difficulty. Silk Road is just one website; bitcoin is potentially the foundation for a whole new economic order.