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ajgartland22

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  1. ajgartland22

    Rounding the Bases

    By ajgartland22,

    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 longer and less of an angle.  (watch the video it this doesn't make sense)  What longer distance the runner must travel is easily made up for by the burst of speed he gets when he pushes off the inside part of the base with his right foot.  Contacting the inside of the base with his right foot allows the runner to line his body up perpendicular to the face of the base and really push off of the raised base to use Newton's 3rd law to his advantage.  Looking at this from a kinematics perspective, one can see that the increased velocity, coupled with a more direct route to the next base greatly increases the likelihood of reaching that base safely.
    In the video below, go to 1:00 and look at #47, Howie Kendrick.  Although this is an amazing throw by Cespedes, it is one Kendrick could have easily score on if he had rounded third correctly.  You can see that he is many feet away from the 3rd base line which means he rounded 3 at a speed that was too great at too sharp of an angle. This curved route meant he probably had to run 5 or 6 feet more than the actual 90 feet that separates 3rd and home.  A better turn means he is safe without a doubt.
     
     
  2. ajgartland22
    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 ball travelling over 80 mph and sinking down below the zone.  The way Molina "sticks" the pitch on the corner of the zone led to this pitch being a strike, even though it is very clear it should have been a ball.  He moves his glove up while barely moving backwards, meaning he absorbed and counteracted the downward angled force of the ball in a split second, and made it appear that he actually caught the ball at a spot above where he actually didnt.  When one thinks about the serious force behind a major league pitch, Yadier's tremendous strength becomes even more apparent, as he appears to move his glove at will, even though it is being impacted by a projectile travelling at over 80 mph.
     
     
  3. ajgartland22
    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 an ankle injury running to first on a routine ground ball.  Around 10:00 last night, we found out he broke both his tibia and fibula (both leg bones) right above his ankle.  Although the injury was gruesome, the way it happened is interesting when analyzed from a physics perspective.  
    At the moment the injury occurred, Chad's foot was impacting the bag at a velocity vector which was not perpendicular to the face of the base.  (That is a big no-no if you want to avoid injury crossing the base).  When the foot impacted the base, the force that the base exerted on the foot made it roll over itself as Chad's momentum from his body weight propelled his legs forward even after he stopped using his muscles to voluntarily move his legs.  This rotation of the ankle created a torque that was way too much for his lower leg/ ankle to handle and caused both bones to snap suddenly.  Thankfully, it was a quick, clean break and no surgery was required.
    Get well bro.
     

  4. ajgartland22
    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 possibility of every decision you ever made.  For each one of these realities, if they do exist, there must be some sort of physics guiding the objects of that universe and whether they would be like ours or completely different, who knows.  Also, if there are proven to be multiple universes, how may we use physics to interact with, or even influence a parallel universe?  The last big question I had was: what would other realities of our world look like if some of the smartest men in our history interpreted the world in a different way, or didn't make the same groundbreaking discoveries.  Would we have the technology we have today? Or would it be something more serious, like the total change of the very Physics principals we study currently.  To me, these are very thought provoking questions that I hope you may enjoy thinking about, and maybe even answering.  Who knows, maybe one day we will live to see these very questions answered by the brightest minds of our time.  And how will those discoveries impact our reality?  
  5. ajgartland22
    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 physics.  The bat is essentially a long rod with two ends of different diameters, and therefore, circumferences.  Because there is no part of a bat that allows the top and bottom to rotate independently, the two different ends must rotate at the exact same angular velocity.  But because they are different sizes, one rotation of one end will cover more ground than the single rotation of the other end.  For an example, think of a bat with one end of the bat with a circumference of 5 cm and the other end with a circumference of 2 cm.  If the whole bat is rolled along the ground so the ends spin at 1 revolution per second, that means the top of the bat is covering 5 cm every second, and the bottom is covering 2 cm every second.  This change in distance traveled forces the bat to rotate lengthwise to accommodate for the difference because as we said before, neither end can speed up or slow down to even out the displacement of the unequal ends.  Through a little physics, I was able to explain something that every baseball player has thought about at least once.  And now I get to explain it to everyone on my team and watch them pretend like they care (even though this is really some cool stuff.)   

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