Here’s a Different Look at the Game of Baseball

It doesn’t take a genius to appreciate the mechanics of baseball. But Yale physicist Robert K. Adair, in “The Physics of Baseball,” published last month by Harper & Row, offers some unique insights:

--Illegally modifying a baseball bat by drilling a hole in it and stuffing cork or rubber inside provides no benefit because the energy of the cork or rubber used as a filler cannot be effectively transferred to the ball. The extra material will actually slow the bat.

--The muzzle velocity of a ball as it leaves a pitcher’s hand is about 8 m.p.h. greater than its speed across the plate. In other words, the ball loses speed at the rate of about 1 m.p.h. every seven feet.

--There is no such thing as a rising fastball. Backspin on a ball will only make it fall less than it would otherwise as it crosses the plate.

--A wide-breaking curveball thrown at 70 m.p.h. with a normal counterclockwise spin rate of 1,600 r.p.m. and aimed toward the inside corner of the plate has curved 14.4 inches to pass over the outside corner. But the largest deviation from a straight line from beginning to end is only 3.4 inches.

--The collision of a ball on the bat lasts only about 1/1,000th of a second. But the force on a ball hit for a long home run reaches a value of nearly 8,000 pounds, compressing the ball to about one half of its original diameter.

Add baseball: Said former Boston Red Sox star Jimmy Piersall, whose emotional problems were chronicled in the the book and movie, “Fear Strikes Out”: “I went through a state of depression is all. There was a lot of pressure to succeed, and I couldn’t handle it. I was just a kid. But I got over it. And it’s funny, but I made a lot of money on it.

“The movie was all wrong; they changed the script entirely. They made my family bad people and they weren’t. My father wasn’t a bad guy and neither were my relatives. They made it Hollywood, is what they did.”

Trivia time: Who is the NHL’s all-time leader in penalty minutes?

Birds of a feather: Harold Ballard, 86, owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, is seriously ill in a Miami hospital with heart and kidney problems. His girlfriend, Yolanda MacMillan, had sought to marry him, but Ballard collapsed before she could get him to the altar.

Ballard’s children have placed a guardian in Miami to prevent her from marrying their father surreptitiously. Said MacMillan: “Even vultures wait until a human being is legally dead before they descend on their prey.”

Add NHL: The St. Louis Blues’ Brett Hull, son of Bobby Hull, on being the NHL’s leading scorer: “When you grow up so long living in a shadow like that, it’s nice to do something to break out of it a little. But you’ve got to put up with it. If Joe Montana’s kid grows up to be a quarterback and doesn’t expect to be compared to him, he’s in trouble.”

Bad sign: Dick Motta, the Sacramento Kings’ new coach, on center Ralph Sampson, who has four years remaining on his contract at $2.1 million a season: “Right now, Ralph is just clogging things up. If he’s crippled and can’t help us, I have to know by the end of this season.”

Trivia answer: Dave (Tiger) Williams, who played 962 games in 14 seasons and amassed 3,966 minutes in penalties--an average of 4.12 minutes a game.

Quotebook: Right wing Sylvain Turgeon of the New Jersey Devils, on bad blood between Soviet teammates Alexei Kasatonov and Viacheslav Fetisov: “They can both help the team, as long as they don’t kill each other.”