It looks cool and it seems like everyone who is actually good at bowling will make the ball spin and curve.. My question is why?
Again, I’m not good at bowling but why aren’t people just smashing it in the middle? If you’re gonna dedicate countless of hours to practicing, why not master the most consistent type of throw? Is there some physics aspect that makes the pins go down easier when hit by a ball that has a sideway rotation
In: Physics
If you hit the pins straight into the locker, the ball will careen off to the side. If the ball curves, it will continue into the pins on the opposite side of the pocket.
well, a few factors. For one they are trying to get “around” the batsman, which naturally requires some degree of subterfuge to get past someone literally watching and waiting for you to try. A curved path, especially one that changes curvature for some reason, is much harder to predict and intercept than full power straight down the middle. They also want to tempt the batsman into swinging and getting a suboptimal strike that forces them to run but doesn’t give them much time.
The short answer is if you hit the headpin (the one in the front) dead on its much more random of how it will clear the pins behind it. The curve allows the ball to hit the “pocket” which is the space between the head pin and either the pin behind it to the left or right which makes it more likely to get a controlled release of pins that will take out more pins consistently.
The head pin will shoot out to one side while the ball will take out a lot on the other side and then it kinda comes down to some skill and some luck when it comes to getting a strike. Great bowlers will just be super consistent at hitting the same spots on the pocket.
As for whoever found that this was a better method I have no idea but I bet they were drunk and messing around like most people normally do on a bowling alley.
throwing the ball perfectly straight with power behind it is actually difficult to do consistently, theres a natural tendency to curve the ball so its easier to adjust where the ball hits with a controlled spin/hook. hitting the pins straight on pin 1 also has a higher risk of 7,10 split(2 outer pins) which is near impossible to pick up. the optimal spot to hit for a strike is the pocket between pin 1 and either 2(left hand) or 3(right hand) so that the pins fan out with a better chance to knock down the outer most pins, this is best achieved by coming in at a closer angle which spinning/hooking the ball does
As others have pointed out, trying to roll the ball straight down the middle will tend to clear the middle pins but leave the outer pins on both sides standing. So not only does that stop you throwing a strike, but it also makes it almost impossible to clear the remaining pins with your one remaining throw, to hit a spare. You could throw straight and more to the side, but that will tend to only clear one side, with zero chance of a strike.
To throw a strike, what you want is to hit somewhere between the pin that is at the tip of the triangle, and the pin next to it, either to the left or the right. Let’s assume you pick slightly right of center. You then want the ball to be coming in diagonally from that point, cutting leftwards across the triangle rather than going parallel to the bowling lane. But how do you do this? There is no straight line from where you throw the ball that lets it cut diagonally across the pins. You’d have to “steer” the ball around a bend somehow, so that it can approach in one direction, and then hit the pins in another direction.
This is where spin comes in, but there’s a crucial element that other answers have left out (or else I’ve missed it): the surface that the ball rolls on is **oiled**, which makes it slippery. And this oil isn’t applied evenly across the lane. There is more oil at the beginning than at the end. This means that, just after you release it, the ball tends to slide across the surface more than roll, and so its spin doesn’t impact the ball’s trajectory at this stage. It just slides in the direction that you released it in. But then, usually about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way along the lane, the oil cuts out and the ball experiences a lot more friction with the ground, which means that its spin now starts to impart a force, and thus steers the ball in a different direction. And that’s how you can get a bowling ball to go around a curved trajectory.
An important part of high-level bowling is that different lanes have different oil patterns, either by design or due to wear from usage. So a good bowler has to understand the oil pattern they are dealing with, and how to adjust their throw.
Someone already mentioned [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFPJf-wKTd0) way down in the comments, but here it is again.
We’re not talking cricket are we?
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