How fast baseball after hit

Say a mph fastball takes milliseconds after the pitcher releases the ball to reach the plate. The chess match becomes a guessing game. By Sean Quinton Seattle Times sports producer. Total: ms. Charlie Metro: "It's a very difficult thing to do, to hit a moving ball at 95 miles an hour in one-tenth of a second!

By the time the ball has traveled a dozen feet from the pitcher's mound, the batter has a good visual fix on it. In a thought process much too quick for deliberation, he has decided whether the pitch is a fastball, curveball, slider, knuckleball, screwball, or whatever -- yet a good deal of data has gone into this instantaneous and non-verbal decision.

Charlie Metro: "The good hitters get their tip-off from the pitchers. And there are many, many ways that a pitcher tips off his pitches. He grips it like that [fingers straight over top of ball]; there's your fastball. When he throws a curveball, he chokes the ball [wedges it between his thumb and forefinger, gripping it on the side so it sticks out].

Now see how much white of the ball shows on a fastball? And how much more white shows on a curveball? Another thing is when they bring the ball into the glove, when they come in with a flat wrist like that, that'll be a fastball.

When they turn their wrist like that, it's a breaking pitch. There are many, many ways, and the good hitters pick out these things. During the entire middle portion of the pitch, the batter must time the ball and decide where to swing.

If the batter decides to swing, he must start when the ball is approximately 25 to 30 feet in front of the plate. The ball will arrive at the plate about thousandths of a second later -- about the limit of human reaction time. The bat must make contact with the ball within an even smaller time range: A few thousandths of a second error in timing will result in a foul ball. Position is important, too. Hitting the ball only a few millimeters too high or too low results in a fly ball or a grounder.

Exactly how humans are able to estimate the expected position of a quickly moving ball is unknown. Obviously, this remarkable skill is learned through long practice. Eye-brain-body coordination is acquired only by going through the motions over and over; even so, the batter misses most of the time.

Getting a hit three times out of ten at bat is considered an excellent average. It's interesting that George Schaller and other ethologists have observed that lions and cheetahs are also successful only about a third of the time in capturing their prey.

Human reaction time is ultimately limited by how fast nerve cells conduct nerve impulses. Although this speed is almost miles per hour, messages still take a significant amount of time to travel from sensory organs to the brain and back to the appropriate muscle groups.

A few reactions are fast because they skip the brain altogether--the knee-jerk reflex, for example, requiring only a few nerve-cell-to-nerve-cell interconnections, and thus happens in "the blink of an eye.

Boosting two factors -- the mass of the bat and the speed of the swing -- can raise batted ball speed BBS , which adds distance to a hit. But swing speed can affect BBS more dramatically. Research has shown that doubling the weight of a ounce wood bat can raise a BBS of But Daniel Russell, a professor at Kettering University in Michigan, found that doubling the swing speed of a ounce bat can raise a BBS of 62 mph to In terms of turning a hit into a homer: Against a mph fastball, every 1-mph increase in swing speed extends distance about 8 ft.

University of Arizona professor Terry Bahill found that the maximum bat weight before swing speed drops is about 41 ounces. But a pro player's ideal bat weight, he says, is lighter -- in the to ounce range. This weight produces a BBS 1 percent below the BBS of the maximum-weight bat -- allowing the batter greater maneuverability with a negligible loss of power.

Zimmerman has discovered the same principle with his in. For the first 50 milliseconds of a swing, a batter can stop his 2-pound bat in time to check the swing. By milliseconds, the bat, moving at up to 80 mph, carries too much inertia to be stopped. In order to take advantage of a wind, hitters may try to alter the trajectory of their hits.

Former Oakland A's star Rickey Henderson says: "When the wind is blowing in, you really try to keep the ball out of the air as much as you can, and try to hit the ball on a line drive that can get through the wind. The density of the atmosphere can also play a role in how far a hit travels. Says Johnson: "In the Colorado Rockies' new stadium Coors Field , which is at a high altitude, they have much thinner air, so the ball flies much farther.

How can something as light as air slow down a hit? After all, air feels like it's hardly there. Exploratorium scientist Paul Doherty explains: "The ball travels through the air after it comes off the bat. Now we don't think of air as being much of anything. But if you're riding in a convertible, and you stick your hand up into the airstream, you know the air can really push on your hand. And the air is really pushing on this ball, slowing it down, making the difference between clearing the fences and a long fly out.

Take away the air, and a hit ball would travel a lot farther. Say that the ball, struck by the bat, flies into the air at miles per hour, at an angle of 55 degrees.

If the ball were flying through a vacuum, the distance it would travel would be determined solely by the ability to resist gravity imparted by its speed and trajectory; without all that air in the way, the ball would travel feet!

Even in a stadium twice as large as those that exist, a foot hit would still be a home run. For the moment, though, as long as we're stuck playing on earth, baseballs must travel through air.

So what is it about traveling through air that affects a hit? The two properties of air that affect a ball's flight are density and viscosity. In a dense gas or fluid, the molecules are close together, and any object moving through the substance must push aside a large number of molecules.

All this effort takes some energy, diminishing the distance the ball will travel. The viscosity of a substance reflects how much it resists flowing, and also how sticky it is. Substances like motor oil and honey have a high viscosity, while gasoline and benzene are low-viscosity liquids. Gases are much less viscous than fluids -- about times less. The viscosity of air increases slightly as temperatures increase, but not enough to make a noticeable difference in drag on the ball. The density of air changes with variations in temperature, pressure, and humidity.

As the temperature increases, the air density decreases. For instance, air is 12 percent less dense at 95 degrees Fahrenheit than it is at 30 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in markedly less drag. Density also decreases with a drop in air pressure. As you move to higher altitudes, air pressure decreases significantly -- about 3 percent for every feet of elevation.

So a moving baseball experiences about 16 percent less drag at the 5, foot elevation of Denver's Coors Field than at a sea-level stadium like Boston's Fenway Park. Humidity is a measure of the percentage of water vapor in the air. An increase in humidity has a surprising effect on air density: As humidity increases, air density decreases. In damp air, the large, heavy oxygen and nitrogen molecules are replaced by lighter water molecules, resulting in less density -- in essence, lighter air.

Physicist Paul Doherty explains it this way: "We think of humidity as something that's added to the air on a hot, muggy day. So you might think that a ball would go farther on a dry day than on a humid day.