Baseball King Balls are specially designed polyethylene baseballs from Japan. By making adjustments to that band in the centre of each ball, you can alter their aerodynamics, thereby throwing a sinker, curveball, knuckleball, riser or screwball at will (no special training required!). The catch? There is no catch! Well… other than the obvious fact that these puppies aren’t regulation.

But I’m sure that millions of fans and countless MLB officials won’t even notice you holding the Baseball King on the cover of Sports Illustrated. [Japan Trend Shop via OhGizmo!]

Developed by the University of Tokyo, two baseball robots, a pitcher and a batter, play head to head in near perfection.

The pitching robot uses an arm from MIT and a three-fingered hand developed in-house (that’s so nimble it can open and close 10 times per second) to release a strike zone pitch 90% of the time. Meanwhile the batting robot offers intense competition by wielding a 1000fps camera that can track the pitch in realtime, connecting with the ball almost every time it flies in the strike zone.

But before you get too excited, know that the pitching bot only throws the ball at 38kph. So it’s likely that a classic batting cage bot could strike out more MLBers than anything coming out of the labs…for now. Researchers hope to increase pitch speed to 150kph soon and work curve balls and sliders into the mix. We’ll see how well the batting robot (and puny humans) can keep up then. [Mainichi via Pink Tentacle via CrunchGear]

The Vector O bat features three little air vents just above the handle to decrease both weight and air resistance, although it seems to us that a bat is rotated while swung and would thus render the aerodynamic benefits null. It’s made of some kind of alloy, so even without any topical sarcasm about baseball, it can’t be used in the pros—but at $US280, you’d have to take your stickball at least a little seriously to buy it. [Reebok via Boing Boing Gadgets]

11-year-old Mitchell Anderson had just finished practicing in the batting cage and was gathering balls in his helmet. Unfortunately for him, there was one ball left still rattling around in the machine.

The ball shot out at 112kph, striking Anderson in the skull. He wasn’t knocked completely unconscious and was surprised to discover his head swelling in instead of out. This was because he had multiple skull fractures that were causing blood to collect in his brain. Bad news.

Surgeons had to relieve the pressure in his skull to keep blood from entering more parts of his brain. Because seven areas of his brain had collapsed, there was a fear that permanent brain damage could result.

Now, 7 years later, Mitchell is one of the top players on his high school baseball team, batting a .455 with a .714 on-base percentage.

An impressive recovery and comeback to be sure, but he’s got to know that somewhere out there is a pitching machine that wants to finish the job. Watch your back, Anderson. [News Journal Online]

Machines Behaving Deadly: A week exploring the sometimes difficult relationship between man and technology.

MLB’s awesome and feature-packed iPhone app could be getting that killer feature—live video streaming—this summer thanks to a new streaming tool in iPhone 3.0, says MLB Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman.

Here’s what he says specifically:

If there were a heaven and it came out in midseason, maybe we offer a game or two a day and that way we don’t drop the price for At Bat. We would love to do live games on the iPhone. I think people would watch. A whole game? Probably not. But ten minutes?

Beyond that, MLB.TV is about to crush everyone’s expectations of what live web video should be: More than 2,000 games in HD, which you can watch four of simultaneously with a mosaic picture-in-picture, multiple audio tracks to pick from and full DVR features like pause and rewind. They’re also working on finally allowing in-market web streaming, so you can watch your local team online if you feel like it, not just on your TV.

If I actually liked baseball, I’d pretty hyped right about now. But I wonder if their pay model would be able to be applied anywhere else—would people pay for network programming (Hulu) if it had this kind of functionality? Or just go to torrents?[Alley Insider, MLB.TV]

Yep, that’s double the price of last year’s app, but it now has a live audio broadcast for every regular and post season game on top of everything that made the original great: Video highlights, live play-by-play, real-time pitching data, scores, schedules and more wrapped up in a really impressive package.

The free version gives you real-time scores, game updates and league standings, if you’re just a regular fan, not a super one. [MLB via Daring Fireball]

This kind of augmented reality tech has been seen before, most recently in a German Mini advert that placed a Mini Cabrio on a magazine, via a webcam. These cards (video here) take the concept a little bit further, with custom 3D models suited to each player and even a few little pitching, batting and catching games. The cards will be available in different editions in packs of either five or ten, for $US1.00 or $US2.00, respectively.

A rep for Upper Deck fired back, cryptically promising competing cards that “come alive and contain video.” What this means, I have no idea, but at any rate it looks like baseball cards won’t die quietly. [NYT]

The video ends with a “Hatfield engineer” looking into the distance and musing about how nuclear power might be in the future for the launcher: “We’ve talked about rocket-propelled hot dogs, we’ve said, you know, is nuclear power an option? We’d have to play with it a little bit…” It’s pretty much the best mockumentary I’ve seen since Summer Heights High. Thank you, Hatfield, for extending my Philly pride six minutes further. [Grill the Goodness via Boing Boing Gadgets]

The crew trekked down to Cambodia to use the military’s equipment. At first, the Cambodian military didn’t want to use a tank, so instead they taped a baseball to a rocket. This, obviously, didn’t show how well the baseball would travel at such speeds, as it just blew everything up, as you can see above.

Then, after changing their minds, the Cambodians allowed a baseball to be loaded into one of their tanks using some super-secret method that was blurred out like the undergroomed nether regions of a Japanese porn star. This was much more successful, with the tank launching a baseball at about 327kph. The aiming, however, could have been better.

So simple, so ridiculous, so satisfying. Thanks, Japan! [Japan Probe]