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My friend just send me this video of a baseball bat mysteriously standing up after being thrown. He claims it happened but I say its fake: Baseball bat standing up in a fake looking way

Did this happen or is it a fake video?

Sklivvz
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Muleskinner
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    The batter is Atlanta Braves' Martín Prado. This event is discussed on his Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart%C3%ADn_Prado – ESultanik Dec 18 '14 at 15:38
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    The Wikipedia entry is not compelling: it's citation is bit-rotted. – Larry OBrien Dec 18 '14 at 18:55
  • The [New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/sports/baseball/13mets.html?pagewanted=print) should fire its sports reporter who didn't even mention it! (Or perhaps a more prosaic explanation: it is an easily faked video, with no corroborating evidence.) – Oddthinking Dec 18 '14 at 22:50
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    Or they didn't think it was worth mentioning. That is just as prosac. – spoderman Dec 18 '14 at 23:23
  • I would claim fake. Yeah, I am no video edit person, but I do know the laws of gravity. You clearly see he throws the bat in quite an angle, and just as it "supposedly" swings up again to settle like that, that area of the shot becomes distorted. Unless the bat is REALLY heavy at the tip, this is highly unlikely, based upon the angle of how the bat was thrown. Tho, I will admit the shadow that follows the bat makes me wonder a bit... – Sharain Dec 19 '14 at 11:19
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    If you're imagining a bat with a convex end, this would indeed be hard to believe. But many professional players use a bat with a *concave* end, which could certainly stand up and be stable. I found other photos of Prado using such a bat. – Nate Eldredge Sep 18 '22 at 18:53

1 Answers1

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It happened.

This is from a September 12, 2007 game. Braves vs Mets. Martin Prado is the batter.

Discussion of the event happened online in the weeks following. Example discussion at Ebaum's World, September 26, 2007.

The announcer was surprised, saying "that would never happen in 100 years".

It was reported in AOL News (via Web Archive) on September 18, 2007.

Other video angles of this event have been taken down from YouTube because of Major League Baseball copyright claims: http://atlanta.metblogs.com/2007/09/17/martin-prado-bat-man/

While this doesnt prove this, it explains the lack of alternate angles.

Here is another instance of this almost happening: http://youtu.be/Wonpmn4nycQ

That is to lower the threshold of evidence for people who think this is impossible.

Here is somebody discussing it the day sfter (http://nextyear.blogspot.ca/2007/09/tapes-n-tapes.html?m=1):

After Martin Prado grounded out to second (and dropped the bat in a way that it bounced up and landed perfectly on its end -- baseball can be funny sometimes, and not just in the important stuff)

That was the following day. You can see it is little more than a mention to the baseball community. This was an important late season game. Prado was brought in for this one at-bat in the ninth and his team lost. The significance of this game far outweighed the unimportant bat balancing thing.

As for why the camera doesn't zoom in, they use a fixed view camera over the plate for strike zone analysis.

The fallacy that doubters seem to be making is anomaly hunting.. They have an idea of what should have been the reaction without an understanding of the context of that at-bat or the game in the playoff hunt. Absense of evidence is only evidence of absense if the evidence really should be there. In this case, the things doubters say are missing are reasonable to be missing.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/anomaly-hunting-and-the-umbrella-man/

What constitutes an anomaly? Well, anything you want to count as an anomaly. There are no specific criteria. In practice the criterion is – it seems weird to me. This then opens the door to confirmation bias. Seek and ye shall find.

spoderman
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    Here is a video including the announcer's commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUSFLZ32dr4 – ESultanik Dec 18 '14 at 15:36
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    I'm afraid that neither of those links is a good source; the former is a brief series of eight comments apparently based on the contents of a page given earlier (at a site called www.spikedhumor.com which is now unreachable); the latter is a short two-paragraph (counting charitably) blog entry, I guess, which may or may not have accompanied a video clip or photo or something which is no longer there. Neither one is at all substantive. Can you find any other source? – Reinstate Monica -- notmaynard Dec 18 '14 at 18:36
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    They show that discussion of the event happened contemporaneously with the claimed event, narrowing the range of dates that this would have had to have been faked to a period of two weeks in September 2007. Its substantive. – spoderman Dec 18 '14 at 19:08
  • Correction, 6 days – spoderman Dec 18 '14 at 20:29
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    This answer, counter-intuitively, made me believe the video was more likely to be faked. They are all discussing the exact same potentially-faked video - no shots from other cameras; no independent witnesses who were at the game; no interviews with Prado. The discussion was not on the day, but days afterwards. The quote from the commentator does not reference that actual event, making the audio easy to lift from some other unusual play. – Oddthinking Dec 18 '14 at 22:13
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    Why is it so hard to beleive this happened. I get that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but this isn't an extraordinary claim. – spoderman Dec 18 '14 at 23:24
  • Your edit claims that [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ6mVNDXqb0) was taken down due to MLB copyright claims, but I just get the message "This video is unavailable." which is inditinguishable from a broken YouTube id. How do you know it is a copyright claim? – Oddthinking Dec 19 '14 at 00:07
  • Only one was. My point is that a lack of footage from many angles isn't surprising. – spoderman Dec 19 '14 at 00:10
  • Don't get me wrong. I still have an open mind, and would be happy to see some evidence. However, a static balance of a baseball bat is somewhat extraordinary (ref: alleged commentator!), much of the evidence we would expect to see seems to be missing, and the circumstantial evidence suggests it is a simple hoax. – Oddthinking Dec 19 '14 at 00:13
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    I wasnt expecting any evidence other than what we've found. I'm actually surprised to have found this much. I don't think there is any circumstantial evidence pointing towards hoax. What evidence do you think points to hoax? – spoderman Dec 19 '14 at 00:16
  • Let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/19594/discussion-between-oddthinking-and-spoderman). – Oddthinking Dec 19 '14 at 00:26
  • I'd love to use chat instead.. How can I join? – spoderman Dec 19 '14 at 00:42
  • I think clicking the [link above](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/19594/discussion-between-oddthinking-and-spoderman) should suffice; you have enough rep to join. – Oddthinking Dec 19 '14 at 17:41
  • It doesn't work. It asks me to log in, but I'm already logged in here. How do I log in there? – spoderman Dec 19 '14 at 17:45
  • Even though I can't join chat thank you for your observations there. Im still reading them.They are useful for me in improving this answer. – spoderman Dec 19 '14 at 17:47
  • It's not hard to balance a bat on its big end on a sandy dirt surface. This is just a question of it reaching that state on its own after a random bounce. Given the number of bats that are thrown down, all on camera, in MLB games every year, it doesn't seem that far fetched to me. – greggo Dec 21 '14 at 03:07