I watched some of the live stream from this weekend’s Lehigh Lanes Open just to see how the string pins looked.
I don’t watch the PBA50 tour that much, admittedly. I’m spoiled for options on the main PBA tour between what’s on TV now and years’ worth of tournaments I can catch up on at YouTube. I’m used to seeing the higher rev rates and faster balls, which might color my opinion of what I saw on these lanes.
Some quick thoughts:
1. Bowlers still miss single-pin spares and that has nothing to do with strings.
2. Strike balls in the pocket that deserve a strike get a strike. The pins explode and disappear quickly. There is no difference between free fall and string pins there.
3. Lighter hits in the pocket lead to some strikes that feel a little more suspect. However, I think that’s just it — “feel.” The pins don’t bounce around as much. I definitely saw fewer messengers, but I did see a few. I’m not sure how much of that is because of the strings and how much of it is because of the weaker shots, though, in comparison to the 500 RPM slug tests on the main tour.
4. I saw more pins just sorta kinda collapse in on themselves, and some felt like they fell a hair later than they normally would. They still would have fallen, but they look different in the act.
Along those lines, I saw some pins that fell more slowly than I’d expect them to. In some cases, I think it’s just the strings fighting against them, maybe? Like, the weight of the strings impact how fast the pins fall when they fall very slowly. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it’s how it looks. The pin still have to hit the six degrees mark off axis (or whatever that number is), but then it falls just a hair slower and so looks “stranger”. Everything is relative, though. You’re not going to forget decades of free fall overnight. It’s not wrong. It’s just different.
5. I saw more pins that slid over to the side before falling over. That includes 10 pins on lighter strikes, where they’d get hit from a pin in the gutter and slide halfway across the pin desk before toppling over.
Maybe that’s the new messenger — rather than having a pin flying wildly across the pin deck to knock the 10 pin down, now the 10 pin slides over before falling?
I heard one of the commentators say that they saw fewer messengers overall, and some that went in front of the 10 pin. Some people are going to be royally annoyed that they can’t get their messengers, but maybe it’ll promote better strike shots over pure power?
That said, it can be argued that the final match was determined by a messenger in the 10th frame that stopped an inch short of the 10 pin likely because it had reached the end of its string.
6. What I didn’t see at all were any of the instances people showed a year ago on non-certified string pin lanes where tough spares were easy marks. I didn’t see people making 7-10s or 4-6-9-10s because strings got wrapped up and pulled random pins down without hitting them.
I would love to see someone from the USBC make a video showing a pin setter and how the physics of it all works. How do the string pins impact certain motions and what things do we see and worry about that really make no difference? In the meantime, you can read up on all their research here.
I’ll be interested in hearing what the players think when all is said and done. Maybe Walter Ray will do a Q&A video on his YouTube page again soon.
My Conclusions
Based just on what I watched of this tournament, the results are very similar to free fall. Things will look and feel a little different, but the end results might just be to empower shot makers over power players again. This sport has gone through plenty of transitions over the years – including urethane, reactive resin, two-handed, urethane again, etc. String pins might be the next thing.
String pins are inevitable, short of a renaissance in bowling that leads to an insane amount of money flushing into the sport to make economies of scale kick in and free fall machines and mechanics affordable and abundant again.
Since I think that’s unlikely, I think tournaments like this one are a great proving ground for the technology, and I hope the USBC continues to monitor things and tweak their standards to make it even closer to free fall.
For more on Lehigh Lanes and their string pins, check out this video from Nate and Elise.
P.S. Spoilers
Walter Ray Williams Jr. won the tournament after beating Michael Haugen Jr. and Ryan Shafer. The more things change, the more they stay the same…
