EXPERIENCED baseball fielders can tell how far a ball is going to travel just
by listening to the crack of the bat. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t stand a
chance of catching it, claims a physicist in New York.
“When a baseball is hit straight at an outfielder, he cannot quickly judge
the angle of the ascent and the distance the ball will travel,” says Robert
Adair, a physicist at Yale University. If he relied purely upon visual
information, the fielder would have to wait for about one-and-a-half seconds
before he could tell accurately if the pitcher hit the ball…
