world series fun!

So the world series for baseball happened not too long ago and something amazing happened. Hunter pence, an outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, broke his bat when swinging at a pitch but his bat hit the ball three times after he made initial contact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOkbQVsIk_0

The ball made contact with the bat initially a few inches above the handle where he was holding it. In the video, you could see that the bat bent out as it was breaking and began to bend towards where the ball came off the bat. The bat and the ball collided in midair after initial contact and touched three times total. The physics involved with that is that the ball was traveling at such a high velocity and the bat was moving at a high velocity in the opposite direction, the bat couldn't withstand such a great force and it broke on contact. But the ball caused the bat to continue in its path towards the left where the ball was heading because it bent the bat on contact as it broke. Both objects were moving with the same speed coming off the bat and that is why they made contact a few more times. That doesn't happen often. The ball has to hit the right spot on the bat and the angle of trajectory of both the broken bat and the redirected ball have to be really close if not the same. If the bat was as light as the ball, they would have traveled together longer but the bat decelerated faster than the ball did due to higher air resistance caused by more surface to be exposed. Baseball has more physics involved than i realized!