Stealing bases - head or feet first? - September 29, 2008
Posted for Emma Marris
Don't you love sportscasters? They are always offering pearls of wisdom like "If they want to score, they've got to get that ball to the end of the field" and "What he really needs to do here is hit that ball."
For a more in-depth examination of what baseball players ought to be doing when they are racing to beat a ball to base or steal a base, we turn to Dave Peters, a mechanical engineer at the Washington University in Saint Louis – a sports crazy town if ever there was one.
Peters examines (press release) the age-old question of how to slide into base. Should one slide feet first
or
Head first?
There is a right answer, says Peters, and it is a matter of physics: your momentum, your angular momentum, and Newton's law. Can you guess which it is? Head or feet first? For the answer, check out the movie , where Peters explains, and Scott Kennedy (#23), senior third baseman of the Washington University baseball team, demonstrates. (Peters' final sporting advice, however, does seem to go against his physics knowledge in the end.)
Inquiries into the physics of baseball are nothing new. The father of American science funding, Vannevar Bush, was interested in the subject; MIT has run a summer camp for kids on it; and more than one physicist has taken it up as a hobby.
There's just something about physics and baseball. Perhaps it's the way the players and the ball move along predictable trajectories.
Comments
Such equations ignore the reasons for sliding. Often it's for the quick deceleration, as Peters says, but other times it's to get under a tag, or mangle the shins of the second baseman with your spikes.
Posted by: Brendan | September 29, 2008 11:29 PM