Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/21/watch-this-master-swordsman-sl.html
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3 Likes
Don’t Baseball players have to do something similar?
But they don’t get a couple free throws to see exactly where the ball is going to be?
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He’s great against a fastball, but he just can’t handle breaking balls.
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Wrong on every account.
99mph is about the fastest pitches you will ever see as a MLB player. This guy is hitting the ball at 99mph at less than half the distance from the pitcher. He is pulling a sword from his hip not holding up a bat ready to swing. And actually every accomplished batter will watch a pitcher throw several pitches before swinging either from on deck or taking a pitch or two just like the samurai does.
17 Likes
When facing a master swordsman, the first pitch should always be a brushback.
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And they can see the path of the ball and the timing from the arm motion of the pitcher. Hitting a fastball from a pitching machine is MUCH harder than hitting a regular fastball from a human pitcher.
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OK, so sign him up!
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He had the higher ground. Foolish baseball.
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Especially when they’re crowding the plate like that. I doubt he could get that blade up to chin-level so quickly.
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You don’t have to unsheathe a bat, you don’t hit it one-handed, you don’t stand that close, you can watch the pitcher wind up for the throw (actually a pretty major thing), the contact surface of the bat is considerably larger than that of a sword, etc., etc., etc.
But yeah, I mean, other than all that stuff, totally the same.
11 Likes
Even at Youtube’s 1/4 speed it’s tough to pick up, but only with that did I realize he is usheathing in addition to striking. As another person mentioned, without the motion of a pitcher on which to focus timing, this is much harder against a pitching machine. Most impressive.
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Gaylord Perry would throw already cut balls at him.
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Where are the Slow Mo guys when you need them?
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He’d need a PFD to survive the tsunami coming from Perry’s pitch.
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It’s exponentially harder as a baseball player. There are no free pitches, they all count. The hard part is that with a skilled pitcher, there is much more going on than raw speed. A good pitcher can vary the movement of the pitch, its location and the speed on their fastball, but can also throw a variety of pitches that the batter must identify in milliseconds and decide whether the pitch will be hittable. For example:
Consider Yu Darvish, whose heater sits at 93 mph (at times touching the high 90s). This is not unusual in an era of fastball velocity, but made even more striking when he also throws an 89 mph cutter, an 88 mph splitter, an 86 mph changeup, an 81 mph slider, a 78 mph curveball, and a 69 mph slow curveball (that has been recorded as slow as 56 mph). This gives Darvish an average range of 24 mph between his fastest and slowest pitches, and with his plethora of offspeed offerings, he is capable of throwing a quality pitch at almost any velocity within that range. Factor in his peak fastball velocity and his lowest slow curve velocity, and Darvish has thrown anywhere between 56 and 98 mph – a whopping 42 mph range.
The baseball player then has to not only make contact with the ball, but put it in play fair, in a 90 degree arc to the front of him, and hit it hard enough and placed well enough to defeat the efforts of nine other players to thwart his effort in any number of ways.
Here, the guy is just waiting on a straight ball at a known velocity, that repeats the same way every time, so he just needs to dial in the zone the ball is coming through and get the sword in the way. It’s not a particularly good test of his skill, but makes a fun demo, for sure.
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When the American Gladiators go rogue,
I know who we’re going to call.
Video - this was a real show.
oh no, he used a katana, he should have used a spear! 
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Knuckler when it deigns to knuckle?
