Oh, I say!

While some of us are scarfing hot dogs and overpriced beers and others are yelling obscenities at the TV, some of us are doing cutting edge work in baseball SCIENCE!

Scientific American is carrying an interview with Alan Nathan, physics professor and physics of baseball guru. If you want to elevate your trash-talking above mom jokes, dig some of these insights.

Typically, if you want to hit a long fly ball, you want to put backspin on that ball. The so-called Magnus force on the spinning baseball will be upward for a ball with backspin, and basically it opposes gravity. It keeps the ball in the air longer so it travels farther. So this leads to batting strategies—you actually undercut the ball. You don’t want to hit the ball head-on, which would give you sort of a line drive. You want to undercut it a bit, which gives it more of a vertical takeoff angle and also gives the ball backspin. And the backspin is essential if you want to hit a long fly ball.

Yeah, that’s what your mom said to me last night.

Source.

Rick Vaughn baseball, physics, science, Scientific American