Physics of Baseball

WORCESTER, Mass. (myfoxboston) - It’s the summer science research program at the College of the Holy Cross, and while some work with computers and microscopes, Tom Booth and Kevin Sullo launch baseballs.

“This is a lot more fun, everyone can relate to it,” says Sullo.

The soon-to-be seniors are studying the physics involved in America's favorite pastime, a sport treated more like a religion in Boston.

They are looking at how a curve ball curves, a line drive lifts, and a bomb blasts out of the park.

“We want to specifically look at how much after a ball has been hit is the spin going to affect the ball and how far it's going to travel,” says Sullo.

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Using a pitching machine, several high speed cameras, and specially marked baseballs, Tom and Kevin simulate what happens to a ball after it is hit and record the rotations from start to finish. With computer models, they analyze in detail, exactly how the ball moves through the air, and how the spin changes.

As baseball great Yogi Berra once said, "you can observe a lot by watching."

“There has been a lot of analysis on the affect of drag on a baseball, humidity, the temperature, but there has never been any data or anything that has looked at the spin of a baseball after it's been hit,” says associate professor of physics, Matthew Koss, who oversees Booth and Sullo’s research.

For Koss, it is a labor of love he hopes one day will be put to good use.

“I think there is a time when pitching coaches and pitchers can get together with a high fidelity model and design their approach to certain batters on the computer and they can say well if I did this to my arm slot how would that affect the ball,” Koss says.

While Kevin and Tom have learned about how spin affects baseball with their experiment here in the Holy Cross field house, they are now about to take their research to a whole new level, several thousand feet off the ground.

Kevin and Tom are scheduled to go for the ride of their life, they have been chosen by M.I.T. to take part in a Zero Gravity flight.

The airplane is similar to ones used by NASA, and it will provide ideal conditions to monitor a spinning baseball.

“We want to see the pure spin affect how quickly the spin rate slows down the baseball, without any other variables in zero gravity, we can determine purely the spin decay,” says Booth.

The two will use a modified drill to get the ball spinning fast enough and then release it in to a box.

Cameras will record the spin, and the pressure is on, they have just eight chances, 20 to 30 seconds each time.

“Most people relate this to a roller coaster as you reach over the top and you’re pretty much free-falling,” says Booth.

When all the research is compiled, Tom and Kevin hope to publish the results. “That will make the game better for the people watching it and it also becomes a great tool for the teams to use in preparing to face each other,” Koss says.

Not a bad way to spend the summer, not every budding scientist gets start the day saying, “play ball!”