May 15, 2018 9:20 pm

This Week on Playing with Science We Mashup the Best of Our Baseball Episodes

Batter up! On this week’s episode of Playing with Science, we take the best of the best from our baseball canon and bring them to you mashup-style. Whether it be home run physics, pitching techniques, or the influence of modern sabermetrics on today’s professional game, host Chuck Nice, Gary O’Reilly, and a slew of great guests cover it all.

First, find out more about pitching physics with Neil deGrasse Tyson and former New York Mets pitcher and 1986 World Series winner Ron Darling Jr. as they weigh in on his time on the mound. You’ll hear if Ron ever thought about the science of the sport during his playing days. Learn how changing finger position on the ball impacts the break and how pitchers try and get moisture from anywhere they can. We also go into the mind of a batter standing in the batter’s box and Ron takes us through his impressive memory of his experiences as a player.

After that, we welcome World Series winner Geoff Blum and physicist Alan Nathan to help us understand the physics of hitting home runs. Geoff takes us through his crazy experience of hitting the game-deciding home run in the last game of the 2005 World Series playing for the Chicago White Sox. Alan helps us break down the physics of what’s happening when we hit a ball out of the park, including the science behind the sweet spot on a bat.

Last, but not least, we hear from astrophysicist Charles Liu, Holden Kushner, host of MLB on TuneIn, and J.P. Arencibia, former catcher for the Toronto Blue Jays. JP tells us what it was like to hit a home run on his first at bat in the MLB, we dive into the differences between using a heavy bat vs. a light bat, and we get the details of “catching the ball on the seams.”

Please join us tomorrow night for Baseball Physics Mashup, with Ron Darling, Geoff Blum, and J.P. Arencibia right here on our website, as well as on our Playing with Science channels on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. If you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can listen to this episode ad-free.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen