Have to admit I was shocked at what Belmo did regarding the ball change and not sure what he saw that made him think he needed to change balls. Think this was a case of over-analyzing instead of coming to the realization he didnt need to shoot 250 considering the pattern they were on. He just got done shooting 470 for two and decided to change. After shooting 470 for the first two, all it would have taken to win major #15 is 181 and 166 those final two games. On top of the fact the pattern is very flat; he used urethane which means there had to be some carry down near the breakpoint. Right??? So wouldnt you think a big skid/flip ball would be the last thing you would go to? Obviously sitting on a couch and watching is easier than being in the moment and having to make decisions on the fly. But this is Belmo we are talking about. Belmo just happened to show his human side yesterday as the worst possible time. Congrats to Simonson for making the gutsy call to switch to the Reality when he did.
Same. Belmonte (or Belmonte plus a whole pack of SPI ball reps) made a tactical error on the Wolverine. I'm not surprised, necessarily, that Belmonte would go to that ball; if you saw him interviewed on the Beef & Barnzy podcast prior to the start of the season, you found out that Belmonte probably doesn't have as much working knowledge of the SPI product line as you would expect. He talked about how difficult it is to get equipment shipped to Australia and basically his strategy for equipment was to find a few pieces he knows he'll always like, and then trust ball reps to fill in the gaps. On top of that, at the Players the week, he apparently used only a very few balls, with the Wolverine being used most of them all. I'm sure that's where his comfort came from.
The problem there is that the TV pair for 2+ years now has been incredibly squirrelly at the breakpoint. There seems to be a point around the second or third match where they turn to cake, but then the bowlers lose their looks again. It seems that everyone who has won has done so by prioritizing the management of friction at the breakpoint above everything else.
So what does Belmo do? He pulls out one of the most skid-snappy balls in the catalog and tries to make it work on the TV pair.
Simonsen's move to the Reality was where everything turned. There have been a lot of big, strong cores/covers used to great success the last couple of years with the caveat of having the surfaces changed. It seems to be either that, or urethane.
Recall that Dombrowski opened up his regional Players semi by trying to throw a Tropical Surge and it went 60 feet straight out of the back of the machine. He's the only guy this year that showed any success with what I'd consider a "weaker" ball, and even that was a solid (Electrify).
To be honest, the second-best look to Simonsen on TV (certainly with resin) this week was not really Belmo, but was probably Peters, but he was spraying it too much to advance.
