It all stars with a leather-covered ball, 9-9.25 inches in circumference and weighing 5-5.25 ounces. Inside is 121 yards of blue-grey yarn, 45 yards of white wool yarn, 150 yards of fine cotton yarn and over a hundred years of dreams. The 216 red stitches hold it together, provide a special gripping surface as well a visual clue to the batter and a distance-boosting “wing” (see below).
• In the 0.11 seconds that it takes the pitcher to throw the ball, he’s accelerating it at 80 times the force of gravity – 80 G’s. It takes a NASCAR race car over 10 seconds and nearly 1,000 feet of acceleration to reach the 90 MPH speed of a top-line pitcher.
• The ball actually leaves the pitchers’ arm at a greater speed than the arm can swing. The pitch is a complicated move involving pitchers’ whole body, and ending in a high velocity “crack the whip” movement. The torque in the forearm has been calculated at 80 Newton-Meters – enough to break the bone of an average person.
• The ball is in the air less than 0.46 seconds; yet, it’s long enough for an experienced batter to make a number of crucial calculations about speed, drop and angle. A curve ball is thrown with the seam at a specific angle, and batters can recognize the distinctive pattern the spinning seams make.
• The game hangs on an event that lasts less than a thousandth of a second. That’s how long the ball is actually in contact with the bat. During that time, an eternity to a fan but way faster than the blink of an eye, the ball hits a 2 pound bat moving about the same speed in the opposite direction.
• High-speed photographs show that the ball compresses by almost half, but it is the bat that goes through the most complex vibrational dynamics. The bat flexes at different frequencies, with multiple nodes. In a perfect collision, the bat bends back, then snaps forward to impart additional force to the ball.
• Calculations suggest that, mid-collision, the peak force on the ball is about 36,982 Newtons, which is more than 8 tons of force. The acceleration on the ball as it changes direction is 127,145m/s2 , or over 12,000 G’s.
• Surprisingly, a batted ball doesn’t travel much faster than a pitch, about 110 MPH, although a batter aims up at an angle to get more distance. Based on that speed, you would expect the trajectory to be no further than about 750 feet in a vacuum, a little over 400 feet in Milwaukee. Due to the aerodynamics of a spinning ball (the seams, again!), batters can slam the ball much further. Cecil Field blasted a 502 foot homer in Milwaukee’s County Stadium. Dave Kingman hit one out of Wrigley Field in Chicago that landed 530 feet away. And Mickey Mantle hit the fabled homer of 1953 (at Clark Griffith Stadium in Washington), a distance of 565 feet from home plate.
©Len Lamberg, 2011, www.lenlamberg.com/baseball
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