The effect of spin on the flight of a baseball

American Journal of Physics

Volumn 76, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 119-124

  Nathan, Alan M ^a  

^a University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 39049103022     PISSN: 00029505     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1119/1.2805242     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. I. Newton, "New theory about light and colors," Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London 6, 3075-3087 (1671).
2. R. D. Mehta and J. D. Pallis, "Sports ball aerodynamics: Effects of velocity, spin, and surface roughness," in Materials and Science in Sports, edited by F. H. Froes and S. J. Haake (TMS, Warrendale, PA, 2001), pp. 185-197.
3. A. F. Rex, "The effect of spin on the flight of batted baseballs," Am. J. Phys. 53, 1073-1075 (1985).
4. R. G. Watts and S. Baroni, "Baseball-bat collisions and the resulting trajectories of spinning balls," Am. J. Phys. 57, 40-45 (1989).
5. G. S. Sawicki, M. Hubbard, and W. Stronge, "How to hit home runs: Optimum baseball bat swing parameters for maximum range trajectories,"Am. J. Phys. 71, 1152-1162 (2003).
6. R. G. Watts and A. T. Bahill, Keep Your Eye on the Ball, 2nd ed. (Freeman, New York, 2000), pp. 153-170.
7. R. K. Adair, The Physics of Baseball, 3rd ed. (HarperCollins, New York, 2002), pp. 5-28.
8. L. W. Alaways, "Aerodynamics of the curve ball: An investigation of the effects of angular velocity on baseball trajectories," Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Davis, 1998.
9. L. W. Alaways and M. Hubbard, "Experimental determination of baseball spin and lift," J. Sports Sci. 19, 349-358 (2001).
10. Ch. Theobalt, I. Albrecht, J. Haber, M. Magnor, and H.-P. Seidel, "Pitching a baseball-tracking high - speed motion with multi-exposure images," Proc. SIGGRAPH '04, ACM SIGGRAPH (2004), pp. 540-547.
11. T. Jinji and S. Sakurai, "Direction of spin axis and spin rate of the pitched baseball," Sports Biomechanics 5, 197-214 (2006).
12. G. S. Sawicki, M. Hubbard, and W. Stronge, "Reply to 'Comment on How to hit home runs: Optimum baseball bat swing parameters for maximum range trajectories,'" Am. J. Phys. 73, 185-189 (2005).
13. R. Cross and A. M. Nathan, "Scattering of a baseball by a bat," Am. J. Phys. 74, 896-904 (2006).
14. R. K. Adair, "Comment on 'How to hit home runs: Optimum baseball bat swing parameters for maximum range trajectories,'" Am. J. Phys. 73, 184-185 (2005).
15. Among aerodynamicists the "Magnus force" is sometimes referred to as "lift," which is why CL is called the lift coefficient.
16. A. J. Smits and D. R. Smith, "A new aerodynamic model of a golf ball in flight," in Science and Golf II, Proc. 1994 World Scientific Congress of Golf, edited by A. J. Cochran and M. J. Farrally (E&FN Spon, London, 1994), pp. 340-347.
17. L. J. Briggs, "Effects of spin and speed on the lateral deflection (curve) of a baseball and the Magnus effect for smooth spheres," Am. J. Phys. 27, 589-596 (1959).
18. R. G. Watts and R. Ferrer, "The lateral force on a spinning sphere: Aerodynamics of a curve ball," Am. J. Phys. 55, 40-44 (1987).
19. K. Aoki et al., "The surface structure and aerodynamics of baseballs," in The Engineering of Sport 4, edited by S. Ujihashi and S. J. Haake (Black-well Science, Oxford, 2002), pp. 283-289.
20. K. Aoki, Y. Kinoshita, J. Nagase, and Y. Nakayama, "Dependence of aerodynamic characteristics and flow pattern on surface structure of a baseball," J. Visualization 6, 185-193 (2003).
21. C. Frohlich, "Aerodynamic drag crisis and its possible effect on the flight of baseballs," Am. J. Phys. 52, 325-334 (1984).
22. Athletic Training Equipment Company, .
23. For a two or four-seam fastball, the stitches on the ball intercept the air flow two or four times, respectively, during a single revolution.
24. Motion Analysis Corporation, Santa Rosa, CA, .
25. Y. I. Abdel-Aziz and H. M. Karara, "Direct linear transformation from comparator coordinates into object space coordinates in close-range photogrammetry," ASP Symposium on Close Range Photogrammetry, Proceedings of the Symposium on Close-Range Photogrammetry (American Society of Photogrammetry, Falls Church, VA, 1971), pp. 1-18.
26. J. Heikkila and O. Silven, "A four-step camera calibration procedure with implicit image correction," Proc. CVPR '97, IEEE, 1997, pp. 1106-1112.
27. William H. Press, Brian P. Flannery, Saul A. Teukolsky, and William T. Vetterling, Numerical Recipes in Fortran (Cambridge U.P., New York, 1986), pp. 523-529.
28. L. W. Alaways, S. P. Mish, and M. Hubbard, "Identification of release conditions and aerodynamic forces in pitched-baseball trajectories," J. Appl. Biomech. 17, 63-76 (2001).