Things You Thought You Knew – What Is Exit Velocity?

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This is StarTalk Sports Edition, Things You Thought You Knew.

Yeah, got Gary O’Reilly, Gary.

Hey, Neil.

Hi, Chuck Nice, my co-host.

What’s happening?

All right, guys.

Guys, so we’re going to do some explaining today.

And I want to talk about the exit velocity of home runs in baseball.

You know, now that they can report this information, they do.

You mean like when you hit a baseball into space?

So that would be an escape velocity.

Oh, that’s the escape velocity.

Oh, okay.

Nobody done that yet.

Not even.

Yeah, I was going to say, how many steroids does it take to make that happen?

Be up there in the space station and baseball goes by.

What is the longest distance in Major League Baseball?

For the longest while, Yankee Stadium had the shortest and longest…

Well, in my childhood, there might have been earlier stadiums that came and went that I didn’t know anything about.

But in my childhood, Yankee Stadium had the shortest and longest points coexisting on a field.

And the right field line was 296, 297 feet.

And left center was 460-something feet.

It’s so far away, they said nobody’s going to hit it out here.

Let’s put monuments out here.

So there’s a flagpole, there’s monuments to old Yankee players.

And so if you could hit the ball past the outfielders into that, it could bounce around the monuments and you get the inside the park home run.

And so now because there’s such analytics going on in baseball, they’re tracking not only how far your home run goes, by the way, even if it lands in the upper deck, they will complete the parabola and then tell you how far away it would have landed if it landed on a level surface with where you were standing when you hit it.

So they’ll do that, but they’ll also tell you what the exit velocity is of the ball.

And here’s an interesting one, which I think is a little unfair because it’s ruining the weirdness of baseball.

They’ll tell you how many stadiums your home run would be a home run and how many other stadiums it would not.

And it’s almost cheapens it.

Maybe I hit it there on purpose in this stadium knowing I get a home run in this stadium, and I hit it somewhere else in a different stadium.

Why are you going to take that from me?

You know, why you got to be like that?

Yeah, well, the answer is I wasn’t there.

So now.

At another point.

You know, that wouldn’t have been a home run in the Green Monster.

Yeah, well, good thing I’m in the Houston.

Shut up.

And so, consider the Yankees, which had all these, they’re called the Bronx Bombers for a reason, right?

They have very interesting historical home run hitters.

Babe Ruth’s not the least among them.

And many of those home run hitters were left handed.

And your power is when you pull the ball, and if you’re left handed, you just plunk the ball beyond the 296 foot foul line, and you’ve got a home run.

So no one is subtracting away Babe Ruth home runs, just because they would have only been a home run in Yankee Stadium with that shape.

So, you know, if you’re going to do this, then standardize every field, but then you lose the personality of every stadium.

You’re changing the sport.

So back to exit velocity.

So they’ve been tracking this.

So a couple of interesting things to consider.

They’re typically, to get out of the stadium, the ball has to leave the bat, depends on the angle of course, but has to leave the bat anywhere between 90 and 120 miles an hour.

And depending on the angle, many of them that I’ve seen are between like 95 and 110 miles an hour, but you can easily pop home runs at 100 miles an hour exit velocity.

But I have an issue.

I have an issue, okay?

The only way to get the velocity of the ball is to use a Doppler phenomenon on it.

You use a Doppler speed gun basically, what the cops use when they fire microwaves at you, wait for the return signal, see how much it has Doppler shifted, and then they can calculate, all right, based on the speed of the light and the return signal, how fast you were going, and they’ll do that for how fast the baseball was going.

Here’s the problem.

You only get the correct speed if you are looking exactly in the direction the ball is coming.

If you are at any angle to that, you will measure in lesser speed than the actual ball is moving.

And if you are sideways to it, the speed you’re going to measure is zero because the ball is neither coming towards you or away from you.

That’s the limit.

It’s not reflecting any light back to you.

In the direction it’s moving, correct.

Right, in the direction it’s moving.

Okay, so I don’t know what they’re doing to get the speed of the ball off the bat.

Because if the ball goes up at an angle, which it does every time you’re hitting a homerun, is there a radar gun floating in the middle of the sky of the stadium?

Okay, that’s looking right down the path of the ball as it met the bat.

I don’t know and I don’t think so.

Is there a way to calculate the distance and travel time and the arc account for gravity and then say that for it to reach this particular point, it would have to slow down this much and therefore it was going this speed the moment it left the bat?

Okay, Chuck, that set of garbled phrases that came out of your mouth are all interconnected.

Yes.

There is an equation that will tell you how far an object will go.

A projectile will go if you know how fast it was launched and at what angle it was sent.

Now, technically, you also want to know the air resistance and things, but that’s a little harder if there’s wind blowing behind it or in front of it.

So you can treat it like it’s if there’s no air resistance, you get like the perfect example of it.

And the ball will just simply go a little less far because of the air resistance to it.

Or it might go farther if it has a tailwind.

It could do either.

The point is, I don’t know how they’re getting the velocity off the bat unless they’re measuring it straight on.

If they’re measuring it straight on, then they’re getting the wrong speed.

But then they have to measure the angle.

Okay?

All right.

Now, here’s another issue I have.

The angle they’re giving it is the angle the ball is leaving the bat with the horizontal.

Okay?

All right.

Was it 10 degrees up?

20?

30?

40?

But that’s not the angle that matters here.

They’re doing it wrong.

Okay?

Okay.

Because the angle the bat is swung at.

That has to factor in here somehow.

Now watch what happens.

Right?

If I swing the bat horizontally, as you’re trained in little league, right?

Good level of swing.

And the ball goes up at like a 45 degree angle, let’s say.

All right.

Some of the speed of your bat went to send the ball forward, and some went to send the ball upwards.

The net speed of the ball is less than that of your bat.

And we can know exactly what this would be.

The square root of two…

One divided by the square root of two.

Okay?

If you do the math on that.

Okay?

It comes from the right triangles in what you took in eighth grade.

That’s the math that’s in this.

You’re probably thinking, Chuck, I will never need to know this.

I was about to say, it’s so good to know that this has an application in baseball.

Because…

I’m sure no one’s sitting in the stands just like, hmm…

Okay, so watch what happens.

If only I could remember my Euclidean math.

Write that down on your stat card.

Listen.

There should be a little place when you’re keeping score in baseball for this to happen.

So Neil, basically what I’m hearing here, as the token Brit, not being a baseball expert, aficionado, is best an educated guess, as rather than empirical evidence of accuracy as to the speed it leaves the pitcher’s hand, the speed at which it…

No, no, no, no, no.

We know the speed it leaves.

We know the speed of the pitch because the…

Yeah, because there’s a…

It’s straight on looking straight at the pitcher.

Straight on looking right at the ball as it comes down the alley.

Looking right at the pitcher.

So that’s not a problem, okay?

We got the speed of the pitch accurately.

Not a problem.

Oh, by the way, if it’s one of these pitches that dips, depending on where they measured it, they’re not going to get the full speed of the ball moving in its path because some of that speed is now no longer directly towards the speed camera, okay?

Because the ball is different.

And same thing as a curve ball too, right?

Yes, yes, yes.

Any ball that’s not going straight at the camera, they’re going to measure less than the actual speed.

So a fast ball straight on, they got it.

But anything less…

If they put a camera in the mound…

And watch it coming behind them.

Could you measure it either way, the speeds?

No, no, I’m thinking for the hitter.

To get that head on, that wouldn’t track at all.

No, he means to get the exit velocity, if you had a camera in the mound.

No, no, no.

Looking at the batter, right?

Is that what you’re saying?

No, no, no.

The exit velocity of the hit.

So, all I’m declaring in this segment for you is, either they have circumvented the laws of physics somehow in their measurements, or they’re zealous with their ability to measure speeds of things, because they’ve had the pitch of speed for decades now, but now they can get back speed and ball speed and launch angle, and I’m telling you that the launch angle is not being properly measured to be helpful in this exercise.

And I’m telling you that if you take a level, and I’ll tell you something else, the farthest you can possibly send a projectile is at a 45-degree angle.

This is Physics 101.

You do this like in a second week of class.

However, however, if you hit the ball at a 45-degree angle, it will not go as far as if you hit it at a lesser angle.

And so all of this matters to the batter, if they’re thinking about it, if they remember the Euclidean geometry from eighth grade.

Don’t we all.

So it turns out for most swings, the ball will go much farther at like a 30-degree angle than at a 45-degree angle.

And there’s a reason for that.

There’s a reason.

I don’t know if we have time to get to it.

There’s a reason for that.

And I think all these angles need to be rethought when they report it to the listener to explain what’s going on so we can know who the power hitters are and why.

And that just sets the table for doing more of this and other things you thought you knew.

Wow, there you go.

So here’s the takeaway, people.

Major League Baseball is lying to you.

No, I think…

They are lying.

I think they’re being zealous in their ability to measure.

So then they measure everything, right?

And they think they’re getting it right, and it’s not.

So there is a reason why the farthest balls are not hit at 45-degree angle, okay?

There’s a reason for that.

But we don’t have time for it.

I’m sorry.

Well, that would have been a home run, but it looks like he hit it at a 45-degree angle.

What a shame.

What a shame.

Just inside the park a little bit enough to be snagged at the wall.

There you have it.

Next time, try 30-degrees there.

That would completely change the commentary.

Who’s next up?

Pythagoras.

Oh yeah, back up for Pythagoras, Roy.

Alright, let’s end it there.

So when we come back, we’re going to find out why 45-degrees works in the physics textbook, but not on the baseball field.

Oh, that’s called a cliffhanger.

All right.

I will see you in a moment.

Bye So, things you thought you knew.

I got plenty more to say about exit velocity of baseballs, and it’s been all the rage with the data.

It’s like people are data happy.

They can measure it and they put it out there.

It’s a good thing that we’re going to get more, because what we found out the last time was that Major League Baseball, there’s a bunch of liars.

Lion’s sacks of balls, that’s what they are.

No, no, they want to believe that they have deep insights into what’s going on, where they give the exit velocity of the ball, the pitch, the launch angle from the bat, and so.

I blame next gen stats for this.

Okay, but that’s fine, but here’s, so let me remind everyone of the problem.

I do not know how they are getting the actual velocity of the ball after it leaves the bat, which would require a, one of the radar measurement, radar guns in the exact line of the ball itself.

Gotcha.

So one of these would have to be mounted in the catcher’s groin, looking up at the ball.

Okay, by the way, you just made me want to watch baseball, because I want to know what’s happening with the groin cam.

The groin cam.

We’ll talk about the groin cam, okay?

So, or a camera or a radar gun floating in the middle of the stadium in the air, in the direction that the ball is hit, so that the measurement is along the sight line of the camera itself, which is why the person measuring the speed of the pitcher sits behind home plate behind the screen, okay?

They’re in the exact line, all right?

And which is why if a cop stops you and they’re not directly in front of you on the road…

That…

Ha ha ha ha!

That’s case one.

I’m pretty sure I caught you at 90 miles an hour.

Bro, you weren’t even here.

What are you talking about?

You were sitting in the rest stop.

What are you saying?

All right, go ahead.

So the most accurate speed a cop can measure for your car is if they are standing right in front of your car while it’s speeding and they take the measurement.

But they’re not going to do that because that’s dangerous.

So they go to the side of the road, okay?

Or they’ll catch you on a turn, which is fine because then you’re coming straight at the camera.

Yeah, but either way, even on the side of the road, based on what we just did in the last one, you’re still guilty because that means they would measure you at a lower speed.

Correct.

That’s what I was getting at.

So if they get you breaking the speed limit by measuring your speed at the side of the road, you’re definitely breaking the speed had they measured it in the road.

I’m going to have to protest.

I saw you on the side and you say you got me at 88 miles an hour, but you were on the side.

Yeah, but I got you on the side, which means you were doing more than 88 miles an hour.

Well, that’s because I have a flux capacitor.

I forgot it was 88 miles an hour, wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was totally the flux capacitor.

So here’s something we know in physics.

If you want to send an object, a projectile, as far as possible from where you’re standing, you want to throw it at a 45 degree angle, which is exactly midway between zero and 90.

All right.

And that way, all the energy that lifts it equals all the energy that propels it.

Right.

And that way, neither one nor the other sort of wins out, thereby carrying the ball as far as it possibly can go.

All right.

So I did this calculation for a pitched ball, all right?

You can ask, what is the slowest pitch a pitcher can throw a ball so that it still reaches home plate?

Do you ever wonder that?

It’s called Chuck Throws the Ball.

As hard as he can.

And it will go as slow as a ball can go to reach the home plate.

So I calculated at the distance, which is 60 feet, 6 inches.

Of course, the pitcher’s hand extends forward of the pitching mound and the catcher sits behind home plate.

So there’s some, it’s not exactly 60 feet, 6 inches, but it’s close enough for this calculation.

So the minimum speed that they can throw it and still reach the catcher is 30 miles an hour.

That’s thrown at a 45 degree angle, okay?

If you throw it at a lower angle than that, it’ll hit the ground before home plate.

If you throw it at a higher angle than that, it’ll hit the ground before home plate.

If you throw it at a 45 degree angle, you have maximized how far it’ll take it.

Okay, so what’s going on in baseball?

That is not the farthest home run if you hit it at 45 degree angles.

Here’s the problem.

The problem is your bat speed is only moving in the direction your bat is moving.

That sentence was stupid.

Yeah.

Your bat speed is only in the plane in which you are swinging the bat.

Yeah.

So, if you are swinging in the limit horizontally, and the ball comes off at a 45-degree angle, you did not impart all the velocity of the bat to the ball.

That’s making sense.

Now, think about it.

If you swing the bat horizontally and the ball goes straight up, you imparted no forward velocity to the ball.

Mm-hmm.

So, the question is, how do you maximize the velocity of the bat to be imparted into the exit velocity of the ball?

You get your GM to sign Aaron Judge.

So, the way to do this, but they’re not going to do it, I’ll tell you why in a minute, is to swing at a 45-degree angle.

Then the 110-mile-an-hour moving bat will send the ball at 110 miles per hour at a 45-degree angle.

All of the speed of the bat gets imparted to the ball.

Sometimes it looks like that happens when you see like these power hitters.

It looks like they go down and dig the ball up.

So what they’re doing from the angles I’ve seen is they’re swinging for the ball to go about 30 degrees up.

Okay.

45 is like…

No, they’re not doing 45 degrees.

30 degrees with that power slugger, you know, down and up.

Those are coming in closer to 20 to 30 degrees angle.

In so doing, 100% of the bat speed is transmitted to the ball.

And at 30 degrees, even though that’s not the best angle, it is the best combination of angle and speed, given the configuration of what’s going on at home plate.

Does any of this make sense?

Okay.

Now, here’s the problem.

If you try to hit the ball at a 45 degree angle, but the ball is coming in horizontally, that’s really hard.

Because what’s the limit of that?

The limit of that is, let’s say you want to swing vertically up at the ball as it goes by.

What are the chances of you succeeding at that?

The ball’s going to buy you at 90 miles an hour, and you’re trying to chop at it.

So the steeper is your angle, that you’re swinging relative to the angle of the pitch coming in, makes it harder to make contact with the ball.

At a 45-degree angle, that would be really hard to do that.

So you want at least some of the bats playing to overlap the plane of the pitched ball.

Okay?

So that you make some kind of contact at all.

So when you combine a swing that’s up at an angle, but not 45 degrees, but definitely not horizontal, because you’re not getting your full speed out of that.

You combine that with a slugger who’s moving his bat at 120, 110 miles an hour.

The ball comes in and there it goes.

Off at 110 miles an hour.

You’ve got it.

And there’s your home run.

But I can tell you, if batters managed to make contact at a 45 degree angle, they’d hit the ball 600 yards.

I mean 600 feet.

Wow.

I can tell you if the batter managed to hit the ball at 45 degrees, they’d be maximizing the physics equation, and gone are your pop outs, because you would just be hitting home runs practically every time.

Look at that.

So Neil, what difference does it make if we have two different body shapes?

So you’ve got Aaron Judge at 6’6, and Altuve down there at 5 foot something.

It’s all bat speed.

Okay, but their ability to get the angle correct on the swing?

Well, with Altuve, what is he, 5’8?

So the strike zone is much lower for him, right?

And smaller.

So I don’t see why he still wouldn’t be able to swing up at a nice 30 degree angle on the ball.

The pitcher is kind of bound by the strike zone, and the strike zone is determined by the player.

By the size of the player, right.

Correct, correct.

So I love players like Altuve because, no, he’s not 6’7, or however big Judge is on the Yankees, and he popped home runs like the best of them.

And so we can’t ignore the value of technique, hand-eye coordination, response time, brain synapse.

Am I going to swing at this pitch where I only have a fraction of a second to make that decision?

And if I do swing, I have to position the bat where the ball is, where I think it will be when my bat goes through the strike zone.

And so all I’m saying is, it’s hard to chop up at a ball to try to hit it.

So you still want to swing mostly forward, and get that bat speed on the ball as much as possible.

So yeah, so the big sluggers, they’re not swinging horizontally.

Take a look at their home run swings.

It’s up at an angle.

Look at that.

And there you have it.

That’s pretty cool, actually.

Yeah, so the fact that…

Here’s something interesting.

Now what is the best angle for them?

Here’s a good one.

I got one.

Here it is.

You ready?

You’re at home plate, and you have a batter swing the ball at a pitch, and the exit velocity is like 100 miles an hour, and the ball goes, let’s say, 400 feet and it’s a home run.

Okay.

Now get a pitcher who can throw the ball at 100 miles an hour and have them throw it at a 45-degree angle.

They will throw the ball farther into the bleachers than the batter would have hit the ball into the bleachers.

Whoa.

Because you have home runs that go at 100 miles an hour, okay?

Exit velocity, 100 miles an hour.

Well, I’m a good pitcher.

I can throw the ball at 100 miles an hour, but I can choose what angle for all of that speed to come off my hand, and I’m going to choose 45-degree angle, but you, the batter, are swinging at a 30-degree angle, and so my throw is going to go farther than your hit.

Wow.

That’s a weird thought, isn’t it?

That’s counterintuitive.

Right.

Right.

Right.

See, I would always look at a ball being hit traveling at a more shallow angle to travel further.

And you’re saying to me…

I know, because I’ve listened to what you’ve said.

Yes.

Thank you for listening to what I said.

Thanks.

You’re welcome.

In my mind, it will travel further.

It also doesn’t…

And it will move…

It will get to its destination quicker, because the higher you go, the longer it takes to travel.

That means guys in the outfield have more chance of getting to where that ball is and possibly catch it.

Only if it falls in the outfield.

Inside.

Yes.

So I’m just wondering whether or not the technique is to go for a more shallow rather than to go for the optimum 45-degree angle.

I don’t know that they have the ability to swing at a level pitch at a 45-degree angle.

I just don’t see that.

Maybe it could be a future thing they attempt, but it’s hard enough hitting the ball, swinging in the same plane as the ball, and they miss most of the time.

Nobody gets hits 50% of the time.

They get hits 30% of the time, and they make it into the Hall of Fame.

So making contact with a moving ball that the pitcher doesn’t want you to hit is hard enough.

And now changing the plane of the bat to get an angle so that the ball can hit farther, I bet you’d strike out all the much.

You’d be a lesser offensive player because of how many more times you’d be missing the ball.

Well, there it is.

It’s bottom of the ninth.

We’ve got two outs, and it’s a full count.

Judge at the plate, and here’s the pitch.

Oh, look at that.

It looks like he was trying to execute a perfect acute angle strike on the ball, but unfortunately, it looks like he formed a percadicular line to the bisector and ended up being a big pop out.

I love your fake made up words.

So in summary, it’s not realistic to swing the bat at a 45 degree angle.

It’s very hard to hit a moving target that way.

So you pick a lower angle, such as 30 degrees, that still gives you a good chance of making contact with the ball, and most of the bat speed will be transmitted to the ball, okay, to the forward motion of the ball.

And if you swing the bat at 120 miles an hour, let’s say, at the point of contact with the ball, a 30 degree angle, if you swing horizontally, it goes up at a 30 degree angle.

The cosine of 30 is 0.86, round it off to 0.9.

So the ball is still hit with 90% of the speed of your bat.

So you’re still doing well there.

And if you increase the angle just a little bit, then all the bat speed goes to the ball, and the ball is launched at your bat speed.

And I’m still questioning what numbers they’re using in baseball.

But everything I told you works regardless of how they measure it.

And that’s how that works?

So I think what we have learned here is that Neil deGrasse Tyson is the only person that can have this conversation at a baseball field.

What they should be doing, what they should be measuring, is not the angle the ball is with the field.

They should be measuring the angle the ball takes off from the swing plane of the bat.

And that will tell you how much speed is not going to the ball that the bat had on contact.

Because when the angle is 90 degrees, there’s no forward speed going to the ball.

It’s a straight pop-up back to the catcher.

So you can learn a lot that way by getting these numbers accurate.

And tell me the angle at which the batter swung the bat.

I want to know that too.

So what we need to do is put a request out to our audience who are incredibly knowledgeable and say, do you have the answer to Neil’s question?

How are these metrics?

How is this data being captured?

And if needs be, come and speak to Neil and he’ll put you straight.

Yeah, I don’t think that they’re doing it right.

I don’t see how they could possibly be doing it.

And I think the angle, it’s not the interesting angle, the angle to the horizontal, it’s the angle to the bat.

That’s a way more…

And so what angle do you want the ball to come off the bat with?

You tell me right now after this conversation.

45 degrees?

No.

Back at the class for me.

What angle do you want it to come off the bat relative to the plane that you swung at?

Come off the bat relative to…

I want it to come off the bat straight off the bat.

Thank you.

I want it right off the bat.

So if I’m swinging at 30 degrees, the ball is also coming off at 30 degrees.

And all of my bat speed goes to the ball.

That’s what you get.

So Chuck, you’re a gold star on the wall.

Gary, you come to my office hours later.

Yeah, I get it.

So this is what the hitters call sweet spot.

If they can hit full on and then not deviate the angle of which their swing is at, they don’t get…

Remember the guy Jeff Blum who won World Series with the White Sox back in 2005?

I think he was.

He said if he hits it bad…

It hurts his hands.

Yeah, he gets a handful of…

No, he said a handful of beads.

It hurts as you feel the sting.

Okay, but that’s…

I mean the bad…

Because they still use wood instead of aluminum and they use leather and pine tar and spit.

Baseball is still 100 years old in its technologies and they still use human judgment to decide whether a ball goes inside of a rectangle.

And so all of this is still the case.

It’s a sweet spot.

So he knows intuitively that he’s hit it sweet.

Because they’re still using wood and wood has grain.

There is a sweet spot on the bat, like there’s a sweet spot on a tennis racket.

There’s a sweet spot on the bat where all the grain is working in your favor and it’s where all the grain lines up.

And you want tight grain in your bat, ideally.

When I was in Little League, my best bat was one had the tightest grain.

You want to make contact where the grain is all lined up.

And that’s why they put the stamp on what we call the top of the bat, where there is no grain exposed.

And you can swing either with that facing you or facing away.

And that will line up the grain properly.

So if you hit the ball correctly, you get where they say good wood on the ball.

I like joking in Little League now because they all use aluminum bats.

They say, you got good aluminum on that one.

All right, guys, we got to take a quick break.

When we come back, more of Things You Thought You Knew on StarTalk Sports Edition.

Thank you for watching the Sports Edition.

So guys, we’re in the theme of baseball here, so I just want to…

It’s not often I say nice things about the human species, just as an organism.

It’s not often I do, because we don’t deserve it.

If you compared us to the rest of the animal kingdom, if you had an all-animal Olympics, there’s not a single event we would win.

Maybe the shooting, all right, or whatever that…

But…

How about complaining?

Complaining, maybe we’ll win that.

But running, jumping, lifting, all of this, I don’t think we would be…

But, so here’s something we’re really good at.

And you almost…

You don’t need much training.

Sitting on the couch eating potato chips.

That’s one.

Another one is, if you see a projectile in the air, and you want to catch it, and you run at just the right speed, so that you are where the projectile lands in your mitt when you arrive.

This is an extraordinary feat that I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit for.

Oh, I disagree.

We give ourselves tons of credit for that, because there are guys that we pay millions of dollars to do just that with millions of dollars.

Millions of dollars.

All over the globe.

But you don’t have to be a million dollar player to be able to catch a ball in the outfield.

I know, but Neil, you just have to have such a hand-eye coordination, you have to have an extra kind of sense sometimes, because you do see some people who are-

This is my point.

Uncoordinated completely.

That extra sense is common in our species.

That’s all I’m saying.

That’s why you have weekend softball games with middle-aged men, okay, where they can still catch the ball running in the outfield, and they were never professional.

You have Little League and Pony League and AA, AAA, and the majors, everybody, it’s softball.

Everybody can run and be where the ball is when it lands.

And if they miss it, it’s because they weren’t fast enough.

Not because if they were fast enough, they would have still missed it, okay?

So I’m just trying to tell you that you can solve this mathematically, and we do this in Physics 101, where you have a projectile, and its arc is well approximated by a parabola, which is a particular shape that things will take when they’re in free, under the influence of gravity, and only gravity.

And it comes close, it’s not the exact shape, it’s close enough for almost any purpose that we have here.

And so there’s a parabola, we have an equation for that.

Okay, and so the equation is not only for the shape, but for the object that’s following the parabolic path.

Where is that object at one half of a second, at one second, at two seconds?

Has it landed yet?

How many seconds is it airborne?

We know the complete trajectory of that parabola, because I can write it down.

We have these equations, okay?

Then there I am running in a straight line at a constant speed.

And I want my path through space, which is on the field, okay?

I want my path on the field to intersect this parabola moving through the air so that we arrive at the same place at the same time.

Just think of that.

That’s not a trivial, you solve it with simultaneous equations, all right?

I don’t know if you remember that from your 19th century grade math, all right?

When do you learn simultaneous?

I forgot when.

I went to Philadelphia Public School, so…

So, you stopped that about Philadelphia Public School.

I think I’m going to take that course next year.

Stop, stop talking smack about Philadelphia Public.

I’m sure there’s some fine teachers and fine schools.

I went to one of them.

Didn’t your mama teach in the public schools?

She did, and she taught at the companion school that I attended, as a matter of fact, which is the STEM Academy, so I should shut up.

Okay, yeah, all right.

Oh, your mama come back and slapped your head.

She would be very upset that I’m making fun of her.

She would be really mad, now that you think about it.

All right, Gary, what do you say, what do you got?

Well, we’ve got Chuck’s on the naughty step for now.

You think about this, and the guy’s in the outfit with his mitt, he’s not got any calculations going on on a calculator, on a piece of paper.

This is all going off in here.

This is intuitive, but also add into that, I have done this so many times.

I’ve also now got what I would call in-game intelligence.

Who’s pitching, what pitch are they gonna deliver, and who’s hitting?

What’s they’re going to, how’s that gonna come?

So I might even before this wood hits the ball, I’ll have already moved myself into a certain position anticipating the potential of this ball coming.

This is all in-game intelligence, and then they’ll adjust because they know once that exit angle is visible, they will move accordingly.

Yes.

And it’s all of this going on in here, just brilliance.

What else you also have to learn is if they hook or slice the ball, then the spin on the ball makes it not entirely ballistic, okay?

There’s an aerodynamic force operating, so it’ll hook, depending on if it’s a right-handed batter or a left-handed batter, it’ll hook left or slice right to borrow terms from golf.

And so you not only have to run fast enough to be where the ball would have been in a purely ballistic trajectory, you have to then compensate for it with the extra move.

That’s why you see these guys running full force into the foul lines and into the embankments because depending on what was a left-handed batter or a right-handed batter, the ball had extra sideways drift to it.

That’s harder to get right.

And that will get almost everybody but a professional player, and it even gets professional players every now and then.

And that is why, what both of you said, the place hitters are the guys that are so, like, squirrely and difficult to play against because they don’t match up with that.

It’s like, oh, we know that this guy pulls left.

But the place hitters are like, yeah, I’m going this way now.

I see you guys shifted.

I’m going the opposite direction.

So my issue with that, Chuck, I want to so badly believe that.

And I sort of do.

But if most of the time you don’t get a hit, who are you to say that the one time you did get a hit, yeah, I meant that.

If you really meant it, then do that all the time.

If you can’t do that, if 70% of the time you’re walking home, 75% of the time you’re going back to the dugout after you saw 10 pitches, then who am I to believe you that you have any control at all, okay?

So, someone explained it to me after a while, because they were tired of hearing me rant about this, and they said, you can swing in such a way so that if you hit the ball, it goes where you want.

Right.

That’s how they get the angles.

Yeah, those are the guys like, you know, what was his name?

He used to always get them, was it Paul Olaroo?

What’s his name?

I think.

Anyway, but there’s guys that just like consistently get on base.

And they’re like contact hitters.

They’re not trying, they’re just like, I don’t give a damn.

I’m just going to let the bat touch the ball and that’s it.

And then I, you know, and I’ll go from there.

Yeah, but still 70% of the time, they don’t get a hit.

So just to be clear.

But the thing is, Neil, a hitter will have to read the field.

Because if the field is misplaced and he doesn’t read it and he does make the contact and he hits it to where it’s overloaded, he’s screwing his chances up.

So he’s got to have some awareness.

All that’s true.

But I’m making a more pure physics comment.

I understand that.

I understand that.

That any fly ball that you can catch, you can…

Now, occasionally if you’re really fast and you can run to it and just wait for the ball to come into your mitt, that can happen.

But for so many fly balls, they’re running at just the rate…

Necessary.

So that they’re exactly…

Necessary.

Just so they’re exactly when the ball hits.

And they’re generally not running their fastest for most of those catches.

They’re running at the rate that their brain…

Like you said, Gary, that the brain tells them is the right speed to be where the ball is so that they’re at the same place at the same time.

That is a simultaneous physics equation that you do in Physics 101, and humans do it in their head almost intuitively.

And I’m just very proud of us for that.

Yes, there’s some people who are not coordinated and may never be coordinated, and they were never on the field to begin with, or they were on the field once, and they were never invited back.

But this feature of the human mind that I’m telling you about is so widespread that I think it’s something inherent in just what it is to be here.

I’m trying to figure out what skill, I’m sorry, what task would we have needed to develop this skill?

Because, I mean, it would have to be something in our evolutionary past.

Okay, suppose it’s your dinner back when we were hunter-gatherers, and you have a spear, and you are running to intersect your dinner.

That’s a good motivation.

That’s a good, but you have a spear, so you don’t have to be in that exact spot.

But if you ran in a way that you didn’t close your distance to it, you died because you were not fed.

So the thing is, Neil, go back…

I don’t know if that’s true, Chuck, but I’m making that up as some plausible explanation.

You know when you said about running towards the ball, and sometimes they don’t run at their top speed?

Because they don’t have to, and they don’t run to the ball.

Oh, by the way, and I’ve done this experiment with children, right?

To your point, Gary, do you learn this, or is it intuitive?

Is it a sixth sense?

So if you take a child, a toddler, and you roll a ball to them, they will go to where they see the ball is, not to where they project the ball will be when they get there.

And starting around six maybe or seven, from my test that I’ve done, they will begin to anticipate where the ball will be, factoring in the rate at which they close in on the ball so they can get there at the same time.

You’re also factoring in that they’ve been hit in the face with a ball many, many times, misjudging where it will be.

Chuck, don’t bring your childhood into the middle of the show.

Don’t bring your childhood traumas.

You will learn as an athlete, and I learned this, and there’s a phrase I’m going to use just in a second, when I’m playing football, soccer.

And it’s, don’t let your own speed beat you.

So if you run too fast towards the object that you’re trying to get, then your own speed defeats you.

In football, they call it over pursuit.

And it’s something that defensive players do, and you’re right, it’s a detriment, because they anticipate the play being at point A, and whoever, they’re so quick to get to that point, but the play shifts in that fraction of a second, and now they’re standing there in the middle of nowhere.

Plus, if you get there quicker than you need to, you have to use energy to slow down, that you wouldn’t have otherwise needed.

Or you missed your object.

It’s speed with intelligence.

Yes.

And it’s being able to, and this comes from just years of experience.

Some people have a better level of in-game intelligence to begin with.

Some people get that through experience.

Those people who have a higher level get that experience.

They get even better.

And you know, what’s interesting in American football, there’s the chase of the guy running down the line with the ball, right?

And so everyone is trying to get him.

They know the guy’s fast, so you’re not going to catch him from behind.

Because he’s a running back or he’s a wide receiver, whatever.

They’re the fastest players on the field.

So you’re not going to chase them down.

If you were that fast, you should have been on the offense instead of the defense.

So the only players that have any chance are the ones that come into them at an angle.

And you see these people descending at an angle, and of course they’re running to where they will be when the runner gets there.

Unless the runner puts a move on them, of course, which can happen.

They cut inside, there’s a little chop, and they use the speed of the pursuer to beat them.

Yes.

I mean, it’s just…

But if it was a pure intersection of lines, you would run at the rate that you would intersect them when you got there.

But of course it’s a living, breathing action sport, right?

We’re taking it back to baseball.

You’ve got this guy in the outfield.

Ah, look, he’s lucky.

He catches it all the time.

He’s lucky.

No, he’s not.

He’s known where to be at that moment.

I agree.

Over and over and over again.

Plus now they have some data on where the batter hits the ball 50% of the time.

Wasn’t that the whole argument a few years ago about the shift, this whole idea of like you’re ruining the game because you’re making it so that people can’t really get hits because everybody’s positioning themselves based on the data.

And I’m saying if you’re a batter hitting the other freaking direction, we pay you a zillion dollars a year, hit the other way.

Don’t blame the outfielders for figuring you out.

I blame the batter for not being able to adjust.

Staying wide on the field.

Right, right.

So the thing is, you’re looking at guys who are that good in the outfield, they’re the guys that have read the scouting reports and the data.

So here’s a question.

The guys who aren’t good haven’t read it.

Here’s a question I have not successfully answered for myself, and I’ve taken this to some cyber metric people and they scratched their head a bit.

So here it is.

And you think I have the answer?

No, but you have performed professionally on a soccer field.

Okay, I’ll have a go.

Okay, you ready?

Yeah, I’ll have a go.

If you are fast and you play in the outfield, if you are fast, do you make more or fewer spectacular catches?

I’m going to say fewer, because you’re so fast that you’re getting there to make it look easy.

If I never show up on the highlight wheel, it means I’m faster than everyone else who did.

See, because you know what makes the highlight wheel…

I don’t have to make a shoe string catch, because I’m standing there waiting for the ball.

So, the other side of that is, my speed, I’ll call it electric speed, because I’m bigging myself up, allows me to cover more of the outfield.

This is what I’m getting.

Right.

The ball that a slower athlete can’t get, I’ll get.

And I’ll get that highlight reel catch time after time after time.

So, that’s the rebuttal, Chuck.

Exactly what Gary said.

So, my perimeter is bigger than yours is if I run faster than you.

And you know what we call that, right?

We call that an outfield hog.

Okay?

You’re left field.

You’re left field.

What the hell are you doing over here in center field?

Because I had it.

I said I got it.

What part of I got it don’t you understand?

You’re big outfield hog.

Showboating piece of crap to you.

This is why our clubhouse cannot get along.

Guys like you showboating all the time.

Chuck, this is not baggage hour from your little league trauma.

So for me, those two competing facts have prevented me from settling on whether my speed with my bigger perimeter means there will always be the ball that I will shoestring catch and I’ll simply make more outs.

I’ll perform more outs than someone who’s shorter.

But yet we’ll both be on the highlight reel.

My personal jury is still out on that.

I wonder if we can solve mathematics.

My personal jury is keep your stats on your side of the field.

Center field is mine.

Alright.

Alright, so three cheers for the human mind, eye, brain, hand coordination and the fact that we can do what would otherwise take the solutions of simultaneous equations and graph paper to figure out.

Alright, good to be human.

You agree, Chuck?

You agree, Gary?

Occasionally.

Alright, dudes.

Good stuff.

There it is.

Things you thought you knew.

Yet another installment.

Always fun doing these with you guys, Chuck, Gary.

Things you thought you knew.

Pleasure.

For StarTalk Sports Edition, I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson.