Science Friday - A Cheer For The Physics Of Baseball

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

College basketball’s March Madness concluded this week, meaning that now the national sports attention can turn fully to baseball.The next time you’re at the ballpark—whether you’re devoted enough to fill in the box scores by hand, or are just there for the peanuts and crackerjacks—take some time to appreciate the physics of the game. There are tricky trajectories, problems of parabolas, converging velocities, and the all-important impacts.Dr. Frederic Bertley, the president and CEO of the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio, joins Ira to talk about the science of sports, and about how sports can be a gateway to scientific literacy.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It's baseball season. And from exit velocity to the rotation of a curveball, science can help explain the hits, runs, and errors. We should lobby that both baseball and science will be the unifying theory for humanity to get along. It's Thursday, April 18th. Batter up, it's Science Friday. I'm sci-fi producer Charles Bergquist. There's nothing like a spring or summer day at the ballpark. The roar of the crowd, the crack of the bat, maybe some snacks and beverages.

But if you add science into the mix, that home game can mean so much more. Here's baseball fan, Ira Flayette. I am a real baseball fanatic. And I mean, I love all the aspects of the sport, the plays, the players, the ballparks. But what makes it even more exciting for me is understanding the physics behind the runs, hits and errors. Trajectories, velocities, baseball spin rates. Baseball is filled with these details. And my next guest is also a baseball fan, both for the game itself and how the sport can be a gateway to science literacy.

Dr. Frederick Bertley is president and CEO of COSI, the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio. Welcome to Science Friday. Ira, thank you so much for having me on here. Now, I know that baseball is now obsessed with physics, though they don't call it that, you know? One of the immediate examples that comes to mind is trajectories and parabolas, a ball is launched at angle X with speed Y. And the players pay attention to this, don't they? Absolutely. I mean, the easiest quickest analogy is to jump from baseball and go to basketball and think about taking a foul shot. Shaquille O'Neal versus, you know, anybody else is the foul line, basically. And you have to shoot that ball in an arc and get it in the hoop. And it's really clear to anybody of your viewer that if you're

throw it as a line drive, it'll hit the rim. If you're to throw it too high in the air, it'd be hard to make it in. Baseball is very similar, but on a wider distance. So when that pitcher throws the ball, that ball's coming at such speed. When the batter actually connects with the ball, that ball will take a parabolic flight, that beautiful mathematical physics arc flight. And if you understand a little bit about the math

and a little about the physics of what angle, you should actually have that ball release off of the bat. That can impact if you have a lob ball that will fall middle of the infield, a lob ball that might fall in the outfield versus a massive home run. And so understanding just some simple old school Newtonian physics and mathematics can really allow you to be a better athlete and really get your batting scores up. And the players do understand this and they follow this sometimes. Well, what's really great about sports in general, in this case baseball,

is players actually learn this, but to your point, they're not calling it physics or math. They're doing all these, you know, in the batting case and using all this kind of technology to figure out how best to refine their hip swing, their arm twists, but they are actually intuitively understanding and anatomically living out the physics and math of baseball. Yeah, yeah.

And also the playing conditions. The weather can also affect the flight of the ball. And it used to be that players talked about hot, humid air is slowing the ball down, but they've learned since then it's just the opposite, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about hot human air, and let's go to that bigger word, climate change or climate science, it turns out that climate change not just impacts the glaciers on the north and southern poles, but because it impacts weather in general and there's this global warming, warmer air, the molecules in the air actually move around faster. And so that doesn't

slow up the ball, but in fact, it speeds up the ball. So you have pitchers who, with warmer temperatures actually throw much faster over the home plate. And then similarly on the other side, when you connect properly with that ball, warmer air will allow that ball to travel faster and further and sometimes out the park giving us fans what we like to see. And they also talk about playing at a mile high stadium in Denver, right? It's much thinner air and that does affect the flight of the ball. That definitely affects the flight of the ball there.

But what's even more important to me as someone who loves falling sports is the athletes themselves. If you are training in Mile High Stadium, you're training at high altitudes all the time, your physiology actually adapts to that. And if you come from another sporting venue where your city is at a lower altitude, you're not used to that. And so if you don't have a chance to get up there two weeks ahead of time or even longer to train and get used to that lower oxygen accessibility, that's actually a major debilitating factor for athletes. So yes, as the air itself, but really the bigger toll is on those acts, and you see it. When they don't have enough time to, to quote, quote, climate adjust and have their anatomy

and physiology adjust to that new climate, that new altitude, you can see it on the field. They're hurting, and the home team is having a ball. You know, I remember they used to talk about this one. The Olympics was in Mexico City. They talked about people going there earlier so they could get acclimated to the conditions. And especially when you're on such a high level, they knew how to. do this. Well, and I'm so glad you called that out, that piece about high level. This is not me playing with my older brother. These athletes, these men and women are literally at the top of their field.

So those tiny changes can lead to huge differentials and performance. And that's what will make the difference between first, second and first place if you're running a track and field race in the Olympics, or that'll make the difference between you being able to steal second base as a baseball player. And that'll certainly make the difference between your third and fourth time at bat. You still have stamina versus someone who didn't train at that level. So yeah, it's those small changes make a fundamental difference in the outcome of the sport. Speaking of changes, I mean, there have been several rule changes to either speed up the game or improve safety. For example, the size of the base has been increased by a few inches, which has a tiny effect on the distance

between the bags. Do you think that'll be a big deal when it comes to steals? Absolutely. I mean, every baseball fan will tell you, if you're trying to steal second base, for example, and that pitcher throws back to first base, you always see the replay. You know, the runner diving down and first baseman with the ball, and it's literally a few inches

can make a fundamental difference. You know, as someone growing up loving, you know, Jackie Robinson, one of the guys who was able to steal home base, I love stealing bases. And if that allows for more stealing bases, that's really exciting. Yeah, and speaking of bases,

Sometimes you see them, they're like diving into first base instead of running and sprinting, but that's really not going to get them there any faster, is it? Yeah, that's an interesting transition that I fully don't understand. I mean, I've spent a lot of time following track and field, and it's clear that, you know, as you're running, it's not like you're running a 200-meter race here to first base, right? So that distance, you have the best chance at getting there as you accelerate out the from home plate and you're accelerating. At some point you get to your constant velocity before you get there,

but you want to stay at that constant velocity and not accelerate. The idea of throwing your body and now pivoting, you're going to have some energy transfer loss that's actually going to not allow you to go faster. So I don't know how that fad got popular. What we'll see in years to come how that data shakes out, but I'm not a fan of that. I suggest you just sprint and go right past that base.

Just make sure you touch it. Now, you need to be the coach there at first base. Speaking of which the base path rules have also changed, what was that changed and why? One of the things with base running is you could theoretically, from a geometric standpoint, run from home plate to first base directly, do it into a 90 degree pivot, try to run to second base, do another angle degree pivot, run to third base, etc., again, run home. I think part of that widening is to allow you to have a more, again, almost a parabolic run, that if you kind of arc your run, again, not necessarily trying to get to first base, but if you know you hit a double or even a triple, if you're able to do a more almost,

I don't say full parabolic run, but a mini kind of curvature run from Homeplate, kiss first base, and keep your arc going into second and third. That allows you to minimize your energy transfer to shift to get to second base and third base. And if you can minimize that, you're going to minimize how much you have to slow up and therefore how much velocity you lose. So ideally that might lead to more doubles and more triples, but again, we have to see. Something that's always talked about and discussed among baseball fanatics is major league baseball is the land of wooden bats, right?

Little League and miners, they all have aluminum or composite bats, but it has never made it to the major leagues. And there's a good reason for that. We're worried about the velocity of the ball coming off the bat, right? Yeah, and it's one of those things where you don't want the sport to be too predictable or too unfair to certain athletes. I mean, we understand material science and technology to the nth degree now. So you can make a stick that you just, that Frederick Bertley could swing at the plate and probably get home runs regularly. And so when you get to the majors, the fact that they stuck to the wood, they're trying to find that sweet spot between, let's, you know, make these wooden baths really nicely made.

but also let's not make it too easy for a decent batter to keep knocking it out the park. And I think that's a good thing. And you know, you saw it with corking, right? And before it was detected, corking had a dramatic change in the capacity of a good batter to knock the ball around the field and also out the park. So I'm a fan of not getting into too many composites, and I'm a fan that aluminum bats aren't in the majors. Yeah, yeah.

And speaking of which we're seeing this year, a tremendous increase. I'm sure you've noticed this. and a number of injuries, especially to pitchers. And the baseball union has blamed it on the new pitch clock, speeding up the game. But analysts are saying it's really the pitchers doing harm to their arms by throwing so hard on every pitch and also trying to put this huge amount of spin on the ball. And we keep track of something called spin rate now, right? What does that spin rate have to do with pitching?

Yeah. And even before I get to the spin rate, which is critical, one of the other things with technology, we have all these incredible ways of doing analytics on every kind of athlete. So they got sensors on all these pictures that literally monitor every single movement they do. And what happens, the computer scientists and analysts come back to the pitchers and the coaches, and they break down all this data. And it literally psychologically puts pressure on the baseball pitch and say, okay, well, now they've proven scientifically that I need to extend this muscle a little more, twist this arm a little more.

And they're really figuring out an almost AI algorithm type, you know, machine learning to allow this human being to try to be more robotic. And that actually causes a lot of damage on your tissue because at the end of the day, we're not robotic. We have need recovery time, et cetera. So there's that pressure with amazing technology that allows us to detect more that are forcing athletes to be that much more competitive and that much more kind of listening to the computer science and the analytics. In terms of the spin, absolutely. Spin on the baseball is everything. I mean, there's this thing called the Bernoulli effect in physics, as you know. And so depending on the rotation speed, that can cause the ball to lift, drop, curve left, curve right.

And so the more spin you put on it, as I used to say when I was growing up, the more juju you could put on that ball, the more impact you could have as a pitcher to really fool about it. But to your point, it leads to you extending your arms and muscles in different ways that long term you can't. sustain. Well, I'm not a great fan of using the Bernoulli principle to explain this, you know, spin on the ball and what it does. I like to think of Newton's three laws of motion. Like if, if you, if you spin the ball forward like you are a curve ball, that actually pushes the air up so the ball goes down and a reverse spin pushes the air down so the ball goes up. And it's a lot easier for me to understand it that way. You're spot on. It's just like when you're driving in a car

and you put your hand out the window and it's parallel to the ground, but then you tip it up a little bit and that wind just pushes your hand up. That's the same thing. And so it's a great way of teaching people about curves and spans and baseball. I know that your background is in immunology. So why do you love talking about sports so much? Yeah, you know, Ira, I mean, I'm passionate about that because America has this growing science illiteracy. And one of the reasons why is because us as scientists tend to stay in our hallowed halls of ivory towers,

And we speak in a vocabulary that 10 other people in the world may understand, and we think that makes us smarter. And that's not great. What is great is understanding the beauty and wonder of the natural universe and having some literacy around science, technology, engineering, and math. And what we've discovered over time, what I've discovered is that, well, if you can meet people where they are and make that thing come alive through whatever lens you want, in my case, science, that's a great thing. And so I can tell people, you know, FMX is equal to, you know, MA and blah, blah, blah, and throw some equations on a paper or chalkboard and try to get them excited. Or I can say, hey, you love baseball, basketball, Formula One. You love sports in general, which the best part about that is around the world,

people love sports. Whether you're a couch potato or you're a two-a-day athlete, people love sports. And so now you already have a vocabulary, a language that connects you to that person. And if you can show how science is really cool in that sport that they love, They may not necessarily become Aberdeiite side, which is not the goal, but they might feel more comfortable in understanding, hey, science is cool, and it is for me, and maybe I should Google some stuff and learn some more. And so even though I'm an immunologist, and I'm passionate about vaccine development and cancer therapies, I love physics because almost all sports has to do with motion of some kind, and that's physics and math, and that's the language of the universe. One pet peeve I have with baseball, and that is baseball scoreboards. And I say this as someone who's interested in math.

And I notice that the number one, the actual number, has been eliminated from scoreboards. So when you say, let's say you look at hits, runs, and errors, it won't show one hit number one or one run number one, but just the letter, H or R. And the math size of me says, this is wrong. I mean, we had to invent the number zeros. Why are we eliminating the number one? I mean, it makes it harder to read as your head has to fill in that number, and the math, the math geek in me just has to vent this. You know what?

I've never thought about that, Ira until right now. When I say never thought about it, obviously I'd notice the H's and ours. I never thought about why they changed that. And I'm going to dig into that because I wonder if that was America wanting to shy away from math. And to your point, maybe, you know, we did it to ourselves part of this science illiteracy, that even something like a box score, we're like, no, no, no, let's use the alphabet. So that is so interesting.

The sad part about that is people who say they don't love math, this is why I love sports. They don't love math, but if you tell them they're hitting at a 232 or a 342 average, they know exactly what you mean. Like, exactly. That's pure math. But they're not thinking about it in terms of, oh, my gosh, I have to actually divide this, figure out a percentage of hits. They just intend to me do it.

And so back to, again, to your point about using sports to get people excited about science, It's a language that people love. People love sports. So we should lobby that we bring back numbers to box sports. I'm going to support you. I'm with you, and I hope you can dig into it for me because I think you have some kind of gravitas for this that I certainly don't have.

Kosai was almost in the path of a complete totality for the eclipse this week. How was it out there? Ira, that was fantastic. We were at 99.4% in the path of totality, and we had thousands of people outside of Kossi, just, you know, different races, genders, people of all ages, social economic status, just really coming together because of a natural phenomenon by Mother Nature called an eclipse.

It was spectacular. Yeah, it was wonderful for the whole country, the whole world, who could see it, to get together in a positive way and explore science together. I totally agree with you. Absolutely. So along with baseball, we should lobby that both baseball and science will be the unifying theory for humanity to get along. Dr. Bertley, thank you for being part of our conversation today. It's great talking with you. Ira, an absolutely pleasure. Look forward to chatting with you again soon.

Dr. Frederick Berthley is president and CEO of COSI in Columbus, Ohio. And that's it for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including John Dancosky. Kathleen Davis. T. Peter Schmidt. Robin Casmer. Next time, John Dancosky checks in on the week's news and science. I'm sci-fi producer Charles Bergquist. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.