Washington Post (July 11) -- On Monday night, some of Major League Baseball’s best sluggers will square off in the sport’s biggest annual display of brute strength: the home run derby. Each batter has seven “outs” to hit as many balls as possible out of San Diego’s Petco Park. To most fans, it’s just a fun spectacle. But to Alan Nathan, emeritus professor of physics at Illinois, home-run hitting is a physics problem. Given the distance between home plate and the outfield wall, what combination of ball speed, bat angle and external factors will send the ball out of the park? “It's driven by a need to understand,” he said. “It’s the same reason I did experimental nuclear physics for many years.”
Related story: ABC News (July 20) – Entering Monday’s games, Major League Baseball was on pace for 5,584 home runs. The only season with a higher rate of home runs hit was 2000, in the heart of the steroid era. Science suggests that pitcher velocity has little to do with home run distance. Alan Nathan, a professor emeritus of physics at Illinois, has written that each mph of pitch speed adds about 0.2 feet to the distance of a batted ball, which explains only a small part of the increase in fly ball and home run distances.