Is There Anything Sweeter Than Hitting a Home Run?

Against an everyday major league pitch thrown 85 mph, a bat must move 76 mph to hit a baseball 400 feet. To send that same pitch 450 feet, the bat must reach 86 mph. That’s an increase in bat speed of 13% with a resulting 28% jump in energy.

“This is a very large difference,” says Robert K. Adair, a Yale University professor who wrote a book on baseball’s physics, “and we estimate that 450 feet is the human limit under such standard conditions.”

So far, then, eight men this season have proven themselves more than human. They have hit home runs ranging from 464 to 538 feet. The Oakland A’s big man, Mark McGwire, has home runs of 464, 485, 514 and 538 feet.

The professor gives his theory some wiggle room. If a pitch arrives at 95 mph and the hitter has a 10-mph following wind on a 100-degree day in a city high above sea level, then maybe a ball could fly 545 feet.

“And if the foreman in the ball-manufacturing factory had set the tension on the winding machine too high one afternoon so as to generate a gross of rabbit balls,” Adair says, “who is to say how far one of those balls might go off a strong hitter’s bat?”

With a chuckle, the professor says, “In Denver, under the right conditions, Andres Galarraga might reach Kansas.”

We’re talking home runs because McGwire has Babe Ruth and Roger Maris in mind. And three weeks ago McGwire hit his 538-footer with no following wind, at room temperature, at sea level--albeit off a 97 mph laser leaving Randy Johnson’s ray gun.

Have you, dear reader, ever hit one out? Felt good, didn’t it?

The temptation, by a banjo-hitting infielder, is to say there is no reason a home run is better than a defensive play that keeps a run from scoring. The result is the same: You helped your team by one run. But cold logic is useless in a world of passion. There the home run is the ultimate symbol of domination. One swing for one run quickly establishes who’s the best. As the passionate Earl Weaver, himself a banjo-hitting infielder, has said, “The best play in baseball is the three-run homer.”

When Hollywood created the mythic baseball player Roy Hobbs, it didn’t fool around. Hobbs was no clever shortstop going deep into the hole to save a run. He was a hitter--with a magic bat, Wonderboy--who once drove a ball so far, so high and with such velocity that it not only reached an outfield light tower, it crashed into the steel with such force as to twist the tower off its moorings and light the night sky with electrical explosions.

How mighty it must feel to drive a baseball beyond catching.

Asked by Steve Marantz of The Sporting News to articulate the feeling, even McGwire ran out of words: “When a round ball meets a round bat perfectly, there’s just a feel of . . . “

Maybe here McGwire groped for a thought expressed by Reggie Jackson, who once explained, “It’s better than sex.”

McGwire again: “I don’t know if anybody but a baseball player could relate to it. It would be like a golfer hitting a 300-yard drive, a tennis player hitting a 100-mph serve, a bowler throwing a perfect strike.”

One begs to differ with McGwire because in his analogies there is a common fact that makes each of those feats less significant than a home run. In golf, tennis and bowling, the ball waits to be used by the player at the moment of his choice. In baseball, the ball belongs to a pitcher whose ambition is to throw a deceitful and/or frightening pitch that will reduce the batter to a banjo-hitting bum.

Professor Adair, in his book The Physics of Baseball, talks about a hitter facing a 95 mph fastball: “Since the batter takes about one-fifth of a second to swing his bat, he must start the swing when the ball is about halfway to the plate. He still has a little time to change his mind and reorient his swing--but not much. After his swing is under way for one-tenth of a second (and the ball is now about 15 feet from the plate), he won’t be able to check it and he has little if any ability to change his point of aim. And about 50% of the deviation from curve, hop, or drop occurs in that last 15 feet.”

Yikes. No wonder Yogi Berra said nobody can think and hit at the same time.

If hitting a major league pitch is the single most difficult act in all sports, hitting that pitch into the seats will make you a millionaire. And if you’re Mark McGwire with 31 home runs by the All-Star break, you will find your name in the public prints alongside Ruth and Maris.

Right now, McGwire, Ken Griffey and Tino Martinez are about halfway there. But history has taught us that the last half of the season is the most difficult, now more than ever because the ubiquitous media creates burdensome attention. Maybe, if these men are lucky, they will find a moment to themselves such as Maris did late in his chase of Ruth.

It happened when the reluctant Yankees star came to bat in Tiger Stadium, that glorious opera house of a ballpark. The stadium’s two levels rise high to embrace the diamond’s stage. From home plate the world is out of sight if not out of mind. As Maris stood in against the Ruthian myth, an odd and wondrous event occurred. A flock of geese flew across the open space above the ballpark’s center.

All a man could see of the outside world were the geese gliding to a destination unknown. Maris backed out of the batter’s box to watch. Umpire Nestor Chylak, though he might have done otherwise, called time. He wanted Maris to enjoy his moment’s peace.