The effect of spin on the flight of a baseball

By A. Nathan, Joseph R. Hopkins, Lance Chong, H. Kaczmarski. 2006

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

New measurements are presented of the lift on a spinning baseball for speeds in the range 50–110 mph and spins 1500–4500 rpm. The experiment utilizes a pitching machine to project the baseball horizontally; a high-speed motion capture system to measure the initial velocity and angular velocity and to track the trajectory over ∼5 m of flight; and a ruler to measure the total distance traversed by the ball. The lift coefficients are extracted from the data and compared to with previous measurements or parametrizations.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d17bcd6708f3d345b453d3724711a1042ed1c9e