I dont think the human hand can do that to a cricket-ball. But revs/second is essentially determined by three factors : Mass of the object ( therefore, how much force needs to be applied to initiate rotational motion- Moments of inertia crap basically) , Force applied and length of the Torque-arm.
Think of it in moments of inertia, where rotational energy is related to Mass x length of the object.
Put simply, you can flip a hammer and cause it to rotate far more # of times if you hold it by the base of the handle rather than near the hammer-head, since most of the mass is concentrated on the big iron hammerhead and by holding it near the base of the handle, you are increasing the distance from the center of mass.
When you are revving something ( immagine a sewing machine wheel), you get more rotation if you keep your hand in contact with the wheel longer ( ie, you start applying the force from the base of your wrist and keep your entire hand in contact, all the way to the tip of your fingers).
Same principle applies here really.
If you can create a large enough contact force length ( since we cannot just increase the length of our palm by will, this means the size of the object in concnern should be smaller), we can put a lotta revs on it.
To illustrate, imagine you got a cricket ball, a ping-pong ball, a basketball and a soccer ball, each with a hole in the center ( so that you can mount it on some sort of an axle and base). Now, you apply the same force ( this is a bit ambigous to do with your hand and unless you are a robotics guru, you just have to do multiple trials with hand to get some consistency in data) on each of the balls and measure the revs/sec.
You'll notice that the basketball spins the slowest (since its got the highest moment of inertia, due to its largest mass and size) and the ping pong ball spins the fastest.
It is rather easy to measure revs/sec in laboratory under this kind of a construct ( where you drill a hole and mount it on an axle), since all you need to do is attach a tiny piece of duct-tape sticking out from the balls, position a photogate just high enough so that only the duct-tape stub crosses the photo-gate sensors, hook it up to a good ol multipurpose counter machine and spin away.
I can actually do this in the lab ( though i might have some creative bullsh*tting to do if i wanna hijack a labstation for a hour or two for no apparent coursework concern
) and get back with the numbers of revs *I* can impart on the ball - i am 5'7 and i can bench around 180 pounds, so i would like to think that the force generated by my hand wouldnt be absurdly low or high.
I have done some experiments long ago with this sort of measuring technique ( though it had nothing to do with cricket- more like a stupid moments of inertia lab in 1st year) and i would hazard a calculated guess - the revs/sec on a cricket-ball wouldnt be more than 20-30 revs/sec, unless you are talking about Shaquille O'Neil giving it an allmighty rip.
But yeah, if you are talking a sufficiently small object ( lets say a really small ball-bearing) , you can give it a pertty high rev/s and i cant think of a reason why you cant spin something 100s or 1000s or revs/s if it is sufficiently small and lightweight....I mean if you think about it, you snap your fingers and the torque you are imparting on the air molecules is probably making the nearby molecules spin at millions of revs/s, if not more......
