What if physics baseball

What follows is my best guess at a nanosecond-by-nanosecond portrait:. The ball is going so fast that everything else is practically stationary.

Even the molecules in the air are stationary. Air molecules vibrate back and forth at a few hundred miles per hour, but the ball is moving through them at million miles per hour. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.

They start to tear apart the molecules in the air, ripping the electrons from the nuclei and turning the air in the stadium into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma. As the pitcher releases the ball, he snaps his wrist over the ball, putting immense amounts of spin on it. This causes the ball to break down and left diagonally for a right-handed pitcher. If thrown correctly, the curveball can be devastatingly effective, causing the batters to look silly, either by making them swing at pitches in the dirt or even duck out of the way of pitches that end up in the strike zone.

A slider is thrown with horizontal spin, causing the ball to break laterally right to left for a right-handed pitcher. A screwball is thrown with similar spin to a curveball, except it breaks down and right instead of left for a right-handed pitcher. There are other types of breaking balls that pitchers employ, but they are mainly variations of the pitches described here.

For example, a curveball breaks straight down, without any lateral movement. The knuckleball is the most majestic pitch of all and the Magnus effect is actually its enemy. A knuckleball is ideally thrown to rotate just once on its way to the catcher. In fact, with a great knuckleball, not even the pitcher can know where it will end up.

Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Prev NEXT. The Basics. By: William Harris. With career wins, something about Hall of Famer Grover "Pete" Alexander's windup sure worked well for him. Starting position -- The pitcher stands tall, with his body facing the plate and his glove, concealing the ball and throwing hand, tucked just below the chin.

Both feet rest on the rubber, about shoulder width apart. We then measured the ball exit speed when a 70 mph ball impacted the bat at a point 6 from the end of the bat.

The speed of the bat at that point was set at 66 mph. Using the measured exit speed, the known inertial properties of the bats, and appropriate kinematic formulas, we extracted the ball-bat coefficient of restitution COR , which is a measure of the liveliness of the ball-bat combination. We found the COR to be identical for the two bats, at least within the overall precision of the experiment.

Had there been a trampoline effect, one would have found a larger COR for the hollowed bat. Armed with this information, I then did a calculation of hit ball speed that one would expect in the field, assuming a pitch speed of 90 mph and a bat speed that was slightly higher for the hollowed bat, based on a model for the relationship between bat swing speed and the swing weight of the bat.

The model is based on the unpublished experimental study of Crisco and Greenwald, which gives a definite relationship between the MOI of the bat and the swing speed.

The calculation shows that the unmodified bat actually performs slightly better than the hollowed bat see figure below. Figure 1. Calculation of hit ball speed from two otherwise identical wood bats. Relative to the normal bat, the corked bat had a cavity in the barrel of diameter 0. The calculation assumes that the ball-bat COR is the same for each bat, as shown from experiment, and assumes a particular relationship between the bat swing speed and the moment of inertia of the bat.

The calculation shows that the normal bat slightly outperforms the corked bat. This is an interesting question. A more generic question is whether there is some substance that is compressible so as to store energy but not so compressible that it does not return the energy to the ball.

This is a question that is worth thinking hard about and worth doing some experimental measurements to study the effect. Such experiments are currently in the planning stage. It is quite unlikely that corking the bat will produce any appreciable effect, either of a beneficial or a detrimental nature, on the distance of a long fly ball. It is likely to result in higher batting averages for contact-type hitters.

In July , the crack team of Professor Dan Russell of Kettering University, Professor Lloyd Smith of Washington State University, and I did a series of measurements on several wood bats provided by Rawlings, to whom we express our thanks and gratitude.

The test consists of firing a baseball from a high-speed cannon at a speed of approximately mph onto a bat that is clamped at the handle to a pivoting structure. The speed of the incoming and rebounding ball are measured, and kinematic equations are used to determine the ball-bat COR. The unmodified bat was impacted a total of 6 times.

Then the cavity was filled with crushed-up pieces of cork from wine that I had enjoyed the preceding two weeks! This corked bat was impacted 12 times. Then the cork was removed and the drilled bat was impacted again 5 times. Unfortunately, the bat broke at the handle on the last impact. We had intended to fill the cavity with superball material, but that part of the experiment was cut short by breaking the bat. Various checks were done to assure that the properties of the ball did not change in the course of the measurements.

A summary of our results is given in Figure 2. These data demonstrate that there is no measurable trampoline effect when a wood bat is drilled or corked. The QuesTec company, based out of Deer Park, New York, has been mostly involved in television replay and graphics throughout its history.

In , however, the company signed a 5-year contract with Major League Baseball to use its pitch tracking technology as a means to review the performance of home plate umpires during baseball games. The contract has continued through the season by annual extension and topped out at 11 ballparks. The UIS uses QuesTec's proprietary measurement technology that analyzes video from cameras mounted in the rafters of each ballpark to precisely locate the ball throughout the pitch corridor.

This information is then used to measure the speed, placement, and curvature of the pitch along its entire path. The UIS tracking system is a fully automated process that does not require changes to the ball, the field of play, or any other aspect of the game.

Additional cameras are mounted at the field level to measure the strike zone for each individual batter, for each individual pitch, for each at bat. This information is compiled on a CD ROM disk and given to the home plate umpire immediately following each game. Quite different than "video insertion" technology that simply adds graphics to the broadcast video, QuesTec technology actually measures information about interesting events during the game that would not be available any other way.

This technology is so innovative it appeared in a Scientific American article in September of The ball tracking component uses cameras mounted in the stands off the first and third base lines to follow the ball as it leaves the pitcher's hand until it crosses the plate. Along the way, multiple track points are measured to precisely locate the ball in space and time. The entire process is fully automatic including detection of the start of the pitch, tracking of the ball, location computations, and identification of non-baseball objects such as birds or wind swept debris moving through the field of view.

No changes are made to the ball, the field of play, or any other aspect of the game, to work with QuesTec technology. The tracking technology was originally developed for the US military and the company has adapted it to sports applications. Major League baseball replaced the QuesTec system with Zone Evaluation in all ballparks during the season, with triple the data collection.

The system records the ball's position in flight more than 20 times before it reaches the plate. After each umpire has a plate assignment, the system generates a disk that provides an evaluation of accuracy and illustrates any inconsistencies with the strike zone.

Zone Evaluation operated successfully in But, umpires have pointed out, the accuracy of the system suffers once a pitch enters the strike zone — because the zone hovers above the five-sided plate as more of a three-dimensional prism, not the rectangle that television viewers see.

Drew hit a monster home run during the season, but it hit a tree in flight while still 85' off the ground so the length of the homer could not be determined. After reading an article in the newspaper about this problem, including some estimates by the coaches and a request for some help "Now there's a science problem for you," FSU coach Mike Martin said. The two letters to Coach Martin included below were the result.

The first letter gives relevant data obtained from a conversation with the coach and a first estimate, while the second letter gives a summary of my numerical findings. I thought it would be useful to summarize my conclusions about the length of the home run J.

Drew hit last weekend, stating the facts as I know them at this time and an estimate of the distance the ball would have traveled. As I told you on the field yesterday, a conservative estimate puts the home run at about '. It could be longer, but I need to do some calculations as described below to estimate the effect of a following wind and a lower trajectory.

The one number that I consider reliable is the distance to the fence where the ball went out. I paced off the distance from the wall to under the top of the tree as being about '. It will be convenient to use ' for the total distance to the tree. I agree with the estimate that the ball hit the tree about 80' to 90' up. Improving the accuracy of these numbers would help some, but the answer will always be uncertain.

His calculations have some absolute uncertainty that is, the speed required for a particular trajectory might be wrong , but the key thing we need is the shape -- the curvature -- of the trajectory on its downward flight.