The Subway Series is not, as a non-sports-fan might be forgiven for thinking, an exciting new lineup of sandwiches from a popular restaurant chain. It is, instead, this year’s World Series of baseball between the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, and even if you’re not interested in watching New Yorkers battle each other, you can always watch the games and think about science, instead (assuming the series isn’t over by the time you read this, which, based on the first couple of games, it probably is).
Baseball is essentially a battle between the pitcher and the batter, and scientifically, it’s a battle the batter should never win.
It takes a 90-mph fastball (since this is baseball, I’m not going to bother with metric conversions) about 400 milliseconds to cross the plate. It takes 100 milliseconds for the eye of the batter to even see the ball and send the image to the brain, 75 milliseconds for the brain to process the information and judge the ball’s speed and location, 25 milliseconds to decide whether or not to swing, 100 milliseconds to choose a swing pattern, and 150 milliseconds to swing. That adds up to 450 milliseconds–50 more milliseconds than the batter actually has. This means either that hitting a baseball is impossible–obviously not the case–or, more realistically, that hitters swing by instinct, before their brains have really had time to calculate where the ball is going to be.
To get a hit, the batter’s bat must intersect the ball at precisely the right millisecond, no more than an eighth of an inch from the ball’s centre. If a righthanded batter is even seven milliseconds late or early, the ball will go foul.
The construction of that ball hasn’t changed in decades. Since 1872, the rules have stated that the baseball must weigh 5.1 ounces and have a 9.1-inch circumference. All major league baseballs are manufactured by Rawlings. From the outside in, they consist of a cowhide cover, three layers of wool windings, and finally the core, or “pill,” made of compressed cork covered with two different types of rubber.
An extraordinary number of home runs earlier this season led to tests to see if, somehow, this year’s balls were livelier than last year’s.
A “livelier” ball, in scientific terms, has a higher coefficient of restitution: the speed at which a ball bounces off of a solid surface divided by the speed at which the ball was thrown against that surface. The coefficient of restitution should fall between .514 and .578–in other words, the ball should bounce off of a wall at roughly half the speed at which it hits it.
Alas for the overly suspicious, the tests showed that, if anything, the 1999 balls were slightly livelier than the 2000 ones. This year’s spate of home runs seems to be part of a long-term increase in home runs, probably the result of several factors, including bigger ball players and smaller ball parks.
This year, batters had a new type of bat with which to experiment. Although baseball bats have traditionally been made out of ash, major league baseball has now approved bats made out of maple, which, fittingly enough, were born right here in Canada. Ottawa-area carpenter and baseball aficionado Sam Holman began making them after Colorado Rockies scouting supervisor Bill MacKenzie mentioned to him that too many bats were being broken: on average, 100 per player per year.
Holman’s Sam Bat is made of sugar maple, a denser and therefore tougher wood than ash. Whereas few ash bats last longer than a week, maple bats can last a month. Players can even risk using the same bat they’re going to use in a game during batting practice.
Maple has a more variable grain than ash, so careful selection of lumber is vital. Maple’s density is also more variable, which can result in otherwise identical bats having different weighs, so Holman has developed a device for testing the wood’s density.
Currently, Holman is turning out 200 bats a week in a workshop behind his home. He hopes to soon move into a larger facility. He’ll likely need it: proof of the growing popularity of the maple bat is that Louisville Slugger is now making them, too.
Although tests show no distance advantage to maple bats, their increased use could dramatically decrease the number of broken bats. Mike Piazza and Roger Clemons, I’m sure, would agree that’s a good thing.
