A small yet very important technique in baseball is a player approaches, touches and leaves a base during a play. The idea is, from a physics perspective, to translate as much kinetic energy as possible around a 90 degree angle in order to continue to the next base with a large amount of velocity. The major part of the technique happens before you even touch the bag. During the approach, the runner must bend away from the baseline and then come back to the base in a way that makes the turn lo
A common part of baseball is seen almost every pitch when the catcher moves his glove slightly when he catches the ball to try and convince the umpire the pitch was actually a strike, when really it was a ball. This is called framing, and when one really looks at the process, it is easy to see how strong and skilled a catcher must be to execute it. One of the best in the game at this is Yadier Molina. In the video below, take a look at how Molina totally redirects the tremendous force of a ba
In spite of the title above, this blog post will NOT be about the unfortunate event in which your trusty spoon just cannot take the weight of all that cereal. This is going to be about my unfortunate brother, Chad, who is affectionately known as Spoonhead (or Spoon for short) due to the fact that his small head bears an uncanny resemblance to that of a spoon. Last night, Chad started in his 22nd Varsity baseball game (hes a sophomore) but only lasted about 3 innings because he went down with a
The past few days in Physics, a lot of people have been talking about space, time, dimension and how all three of those things are very fluid in reality. Since the tiny lecture we had on it last week, I have been thinking about the endless possibilities that could arise if these notions become more widely accepted and studied. One thing that really got me interested was the theory of alternate realities. The simple fact that there are endless universes, every one playing out every single possi
Today we were hitting in the field house as part of our practice and I decided to focus on something I always knew happened, but never knew why. Every time a baseball bat rolls, it always does so in a circular fashion. This can be really annoying especially when it gets set down and then all of the sudden it starts randomly rolling off in a circle and depending on speed, always goes in a different path. The more I thought about it, the more I was amazed that it could be explained simply with
