Time to Catch a Fly Ball in Baseball
Initializing live version
Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
This Demonstration shows a baseball field with players and the ball represented by blue points. The ball and the nearest player's trajectories are followed until the ball hits the ground at time . The ball reaches a maximum height . Play ball!
Contributed by: Enrique Zeleny (October 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
The time that the ball is in the air is , where is the initial velocity, is the initial angle, and is the acceleration due to gravity. The mean speed of a player is taken to be 22 ft/s.
Permanent Citation