When a baseball player approaches the plate, he needs physics on his side to score a spot on base. But a rewarding collision between baseball and bat depends on many complicated factors.
One group of researchers from the Sports Science Laboratory at Washington State University explores this complicated relationship between ball and bat, debunking some of Major League Baseball's myths along the way.
As highlighted in a recent article in the American Journal of Physics, balls and bats generally have an inelastic physical relationship, meaning the kinetic energy each has while in motion is not maintained after colliding.
