The picture shown to the right is of Marco Gonzales, a former Gonzaga University Bulldogs pitcher and first baseman who is now a professional baseball player with the St. Louis Cardinals. The photo was taken at the Patterson Baseball Complex on Gonzaga University’s campus. Gonzales is winding up to deliver a pitch, which appears to be a curveball. He has already planted his leading foot and his body will soon rotate to swing his arm forward projecting the ball towards the batter at home plate. Nearly all the people who watch baseball simply watch the pitcher throw the ball to home plate and the batter hit the ball without thinking too much of what goes into each step. I have been guilty to ignore the physics behind baseball all of my life, …show more content…
It is so hard in fact that failing to do so seven out of ten times is still good enough to grant someone millions of dollars. When researching the physics behind hitting a baseball, I found statistics that show just how unrealistic hitting a major league pitch truly is. A 90 mile per hour fastball is able to reach home plate 0.400 seconds after being released from the pitchers hand. The first one hundred milliseconds are required for the batter to see the ball and send an image to the brain. The next seventy five milliseconds are needed for the brain to determine the speed and location of the oncoming pitch, and another fifty milliseconds to decide where to swing the bat. The batter now only has one hundred and sixty five milliseconds, or 0.165 seconds, to initiate a swing and hit the baseball. If the swing is seven milliseconds too soon or too late, accurate contact will not be made with the ball. When watching professional baseball players, hitting the baseball seems fairly easy and is quite the regular occurrence, but to think that a matter of a few milliseconds could determine whether the ball is hit correctly or not absolutely baffles me, and is a true testament to the talent that professional baseball players contain (Fleisig