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A rising fastball doesn't really rise. A curveball
really does curve. And Cecil Fielder hits the ball so hard it comes off his bat 1 degree
warmer than when it left the pitcher's hand. So says Robert Adair, and he ought to
know. Adair is the only person ever to hold the title "Physicist of the National
League." From 1987-1990. Adair conducted
experiments and found explanations for the results. Even to Adair, the Sterling Professor
of Physics at Yale, baseball can be a very complicated game. "There are some simple
things you can say," Adair said, but "if Albert Einstein were alive today and
interested in baseball, he could not calculate from the first principles how a curveball
curves. We have to go back to experience, engineering and experiment." What kind of
experiment? Well, Adair wanted to find out what effect humidity would have on a baseball,
so he stored one baseball in dry air and another baseball in 100 percent humid air. A
month later, he removed the baseballs and performed a test. The same force that sent the
dry ball 400 feet in the air sent the humid ball just 370 feet. Now you know why the
Jackson Generals don't hit more home runs.
Practical advice must come from players.
Adair got into baseball science thanks to the
late Bartlett Giamatti, who was a Yale English professor and university president before
becoming commissioner of baseball. But it was another Yalie who gave Adair's book The
Physics of Baseball its most impressive endorsement. Adair has an autographed picture of
Yale's most famous first baseman reading the book in the White House. "If only I had
read this 44 years ago, I might have batted .300. Play Ball," George Bush wrote
underneath the photo. "Actually," Adair said, "I don't think the book would
have done him much good."
In fact, understanding the science of baseball
wouldn't do any player much good. It's just interesting. "It's not going to be at the
back of my mind standing at the plate," said Millsaps College catcher Chris
Lawrence. "We don't like to break down the game any more than it has to be broken
down." Lawrence was on of several Millsaps players who heard Adair speak Thursday as
part of their school's 1996 Moreton Lectures in the Sciences. Adair couldn't offer much
practical advice. That would have to come from players. "What baseball players do is
right," Adair said, "It's got to be right. They're paid too much to be
wrong." A new meaning for term "hot" bat? Still Adair, 71, is truly a wily
veteran, a crafty lefthander. Though he never played baseball at even the high school
level, he knows the game as a lifetime fan and as a scientist.
He knows that curveballs curve because the air flows
differently on the side of the ball spinning toward the plat than the side spinning away
from the plate. A German named Gustav Magnus figured this out in 1852. Magnus never played
high school baseball, either.
Adair will tell you that a major league fastball
spins at 1,800 RPM, or 54 times faster than an old- fashioned LP record. He knows that
translates into about a dozen rotations in the 0.4 seconds it takes the pitch to reach the
plate.
It takes 1/2,000th of a second for Cecil Fielder's
bat to deliver nearly 10,000 pounds of force. The ball compresses almost an inch, storing
energy. Some of that energy accelerates the ball. The rest heats it. So yes, he really can
have a hot bat. The backspin that makes a sailing fastball appear to rise actually just keeps the ball from falling as quickly as the batter expects. The difference from a normal trajectory can be 5 inches by the time the ball reaches the plate and about 2 1/2 of those 5 inches come in the last 15 feet.
A knuckleball, which has hardly any spin at
all, can curve in both directions before reaching the plate. "Most knuckleballs just
go one way or the other," Adair said. "but nobody knows which way they're going
to go." Even science, it seems, has its limits. |
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Mr. Knobler is a native of Los Angeles |
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