I compared a Bushnell Velocity to a Stalker Sport at a college baseball game. The hardest pitch was 74 mph on the Bushnell and 81 mph on the Stalker Sport (clocked multiple times). According to my calculations and information given, the acquisition times for the following radar guns are: Bushnell Velocity = 0.094252688587596917350713364814 seconds, Stalker Sport = .046 seconds, and Stalker Pro = .01 seconds. What could this mean? 74 mph on the Bushnell Velocity is about 81.00018409090909 mph on the Stalker Sport and about 87.1508011443753 mph on the Stalker Pro. The harder the pitch, the greater the difference will be. I would like these numbers put to the test (please use real pitchers, not a machine). Please use the 3 radar guns mentioned, and add any others you would like (Jugs, Police, etc.). Also, have the pitch on high speed camera (for math calculations of a pitch), and make sure the distance is 60 feet 6 inches from the pitching rubber to the back point of home plate, and the catcher (or equipment) is further back than that (the catcher is a few feet behind the point at home plate) If you can get a MLB pitcher in there it would be great, someone known to throw 90+ mph on TV. How different are radar gun readings?

How would this not be "product testing"?

I guess it is a sort of “product testing.” However, I want these things tested because it would be nice to know what a MLB pitcher throws on a variety of radar guns and put the information up against a speed camera. MLB pitchers’ are thought of as super-human because most supposedly throw 90-103 mph. Are they really, or is it because of radar gun type, juiced guns, or both? What radar gun is being used, and what does it mean for the other radar gun types?

It most definitely would be product testing, and the Mythbusters do not do product testing. I think you want Consumer Reports.

[quote]MLB pitchers’ are thought of as super-human because most supposedly throw 90-103 mph[/quote]

90 mph = considered the standard by which most young pitchers are expected to throw their fastball.

103 = Nolan Ryan. He WAS super-human. I don't believe it has been repeated.

[quote]103 = Nolan Ryan. He WAS super-human. I don't believe it has been repeated.[/quote]
Young guys are expected to throw at least 90 mph, yes, but on whose radar gun? I’m not saying these guys aren’t throwing it, I’m saying they wouldn’t throw it on every radar gun. Nolan Ryan threw 100.9 mph. I highly doubt the technology used back then had a radar gun producing the acquisition time of .01 seconds! Several pitchers have topped 101 mph, including 103 mph by Joel Zumaya, but look at the technology improvement.

[quote]103 = Nolan Ryan. He WAS super-human. I don't believe it has been repeated.[/quote]
Young guys are expected to throw at least 90

[quote]please use real pitchers, not a machine[/quote]

That would be stupid to not use a machine. A machine will produce consistant results, a human will not. What would you be proving if the pitcher throws 91 on the first 96 on the second and 87 on the third? I used to pitch quite a bit and I know that I did not reach my max on every pitch. Also, like others have said, the MBs do not do product testing, the best you could hope for is to have them use the high speed cameras and just do the math to find out how fast it is going. Pretty simple.

Why use human pitchers? I tested a Jugs radar gun on a machine, it was set on 90 mph and only reached 79. The guy operating it changed some angles on the machine and bumped it up to 96, then it reached 92 on peak and consistent speed. Why were they the same, and what did the angle have to do with anything? Machines can be set to throw a certain speed, but the ball may not lose as much speed as it would if produced by a human. In other words, its speed would be around the same at .01 seconds and at .09 seconds after being released from the machine.
I did mention to use a high speed camera above, and if you watched the baseball special a few years ago, you probably saw Roger Clemens throw on one. He said he’d probably reach 90 mph for them, although the show said at over 80 mph. How much over 80? It’s interesting he pitched in the All Star game around that time and threw in the mid 90’s. Pro pitchers wouldn’t throw 90 mph on every radar gun. That sounds like a myth to me.

Let me try to make this as clear as I can. The Mythbusters do not do product testing. This would be product testing. That means they are NOT going to do a comparison test of different brands of radar guns. Period. End of story. Never. No way. Not gonna do it. Ever.

This is not a myth. What you want is for them to do product testing, which they do NOT do!

Are you beginning to get the message? You need to go to the website for Consumer Reports. THEY are the ones who do product testing! THEY might have an interest in this (though I doubt it). The Mythbuster never will. EVER!

Get it now?

I still don’t find it much different from some other myths. Just like when the Mythbusters try different types of guns to shoot open a lock. One gun doesn’t work, so they use a more powerful one. Another example is the diet soda and mentos myth, where various candies and colas were tested to see which ones worked. Another is the skunk myth when the Mythbusters try different products to see which ones remove skunk odor. Another is to try various products to see which ones remove blood stains from clothing. How are these different from using radar guns to find out which ones reach the desired result? The Mythbusters make the decision on what gets tested and what doesn’t. I guess we’ll see if this is included on the next baseball special, if there is one.

There's a factor that may be missing here, which is critical to why radarbuster is confused.

The radar guns that are used in baseball are the same type of guns that police officers use. Decatur and Tomcat are two of the makers that I recall. That being said, there is something that every police officer does before using the radar gun, and after the tour of enforcement is over, that I can't ever recall being mentioned in all the ball games I've watched.

An officer will calibrate the radar gun. This is done by using the internal circuitry that is designed to do such calibrations, and most importantly, the use of the tuning fork that is matched to the radar gun, and must be used before and after to establish the radar is operating correctly.

Now if all they do is take the gun out of its case, turn it on and start using it, then there is no way to establish the calibration of the radar. Use of a tuning fork is critical to this calibration.

The tuning forks are specific to the radar frequency bands used, and the forks have the speed the gun should register stamped into the tuning fork. For example, "65 MPH" or whatever.

If the gun doesn't give that reading, it is not working correctly. This, in conjunction with the internal calibration tests, insures that the gun is operating correctly.

So it's possible, in fact likely, that they are just using uncalibrated radar guns and that's where the discrepancies are coming from.

There also seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding expressed in the original post, that acquisition time is somehow fuddling the final speed calculation. It isn't; radar guns don't measure elapsed time. They measure the phase difference induced by the doppler shift of the reflected signal relative to the emitted signal, and from this they calculate the speed. It is an instantaneous measurement; acquisition times don't have any effect on the speed calculation.

If you think the ball slows down significantly between release and any subsequent location during it's travel, think again. The amount of speed shed over the time interval you're claiming is miniscule.

Finally, once the ball is released at a given speed, it's future velocity is completely determined, barring utterly freakish winds; the idea that a ball thrown by a machine and a ball thrown by a human at the same speed will have such dramatic differences in future velocity is simply silly.

There are 2 types of beams that pulse out of radar guns, at regular intervals of .2 or .05 seconds. Police radar guns use .2 second intervals. The speed reading is an average speed clocked for an interval. For a .2 second interval, the radar gun has about 2 times to get a speed reading if the ball is traveling 103 mph. If the beam doesn’t pick up the ball at the right time (the ball is still in the pitchers hand), it will throw off the accuracy of the “out of hand” reading significantly. A .05 second interval has about 8 times to get a speed reading if the ball is traveling 103 mph, and if it doesn’t pick it up at the right time, it will throw it off as well, although not quite as bad. Once the ball hits the beam is when acquisition time becomes important. If the guns are all calibrated, why are there different speed readings? I still haven’t had anyone tell me why a machine set on 90 mph only reached 79 mph until angles were changed and the machine was bumped up to 96. Why were peak and consistent speeds both clocked at 92 mph? Why is that still 4 less than the machine is set on? Yes, the Jugs gun I was using was calibrated using a 64 mph tuning fork that came with the radar gun. It may be because most machines made use balls that are the same weight, but are not built the same way. This doesn’t show anything about a pro pitcher throwing anyways, because I don’t see any machines used in pro games. The Stalker Sport used at the baseball game was also calibrated. The Bushnell Velocity comes with no tuning fork, but was tested in a vehicle and was within 1 mph of the speedometer. It’s interesting to note that some of these radar guns say it’s not intended for law enforcement I have never heard of Tomcat, I can’t even find it on the web. I haven’t heard of Decatur being used in college or pro baseball, only in law enforcement. Also, high speed camera has shown that a pitcher with release speed of 90 mph slows down 12.92 mph to the catcher’s mitt (77.08 mph). An almost 13 mph difference seems significant to me.

And yet still, the Mythbusters do not do product testing, and so they are NOT going to compare different brands of radar guns!

Again, if different types of guns were used to shoot open a lock, there is no difference in using different radar guns to see what hits a certain speed. If you want to call it product testing fine, but product testing has been done on the show before if you want to include this in that category. Again, the Mythbusters decide what will be tested.
A lot of my information comes from Cy Young award winning and former MLB pitcher Dr. Mike Marshall’s website. Look it up, it talks about the .05 and .2 second pulses and intervals. It also says radar guns don’t provide true release and home plate velocities. You can also see the calculations for the deceleration of a pitch, with findings based on high speed camera.

[quote]Again, if different types of guns were used to shoot open a lock, there is no difference in using different radar guns to see what hits a certain speed.[/quote]

There is no difference??

They *don't* test various brands of the same caliber, to see which one works best. They *do* test different calibers, to see if that can make a difference.


Testing a generic round of different calibers is not the same as testing the accuracy of specific brands.

Read up about the pulses and intervals, there is a difference between radar guns just like there is a difference between calibers in real guns. There is a difference in products to see which ones remove blood stains from clothing, or skunk smell from your body. My last post is in regard to a post that hasn’t posted yet. But for the last one, search for chapter 2 about Dr. Mike Marshall’s website, it explains a lot of things I am telling you.

[quote]or skunk smell from your body[/quote]


Try and get this.

They used tomato juice to try and remove the smell. They DID NOT compare Campbells against Ocean Spray. They then tried shampoo to see if it worked better than tamato juice. Not Suave against Prell just shampoo. At the end they came up with what ever worked best to remove the smell. Not Campbells worked better than Ocean spray.

Getting back to the original post. There is no way you should be getting that type of discrepancy between guns. And as MuchkinPuncher said, acquisition time has nothing to do with it. Something else is seriously wrong here. All the guns should have a stated accuracy specification. If they don't read within that specification then they need to be calibrated.