Here is an interesting paper by James, Carré, and Haake.  They build a Newtonian model of what happens when a cricket ball bounces on a pitch.  It turns out that the “pace” of a pitch (ie, what percent of velocity a ball retains after bouncing) can be predicted fairly well by this model, which uses some physical pitch measurements as parameters.

You can find the abstract of this paper at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/g551516250368338/.