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Q&A with Bill Nye The 47-year-old celebrity scientist -- you've seen him teaching kids about gravity and other natural forces on PBS -- is a baseball obsessive and a Mariners fanPosted: Thursday June 12, 2003 12:42 PM
Nye: It makes the bat lighter in the business end, and there's a pseudoscientific notion that it makes the bat springier, but this turns out not to be the case. SI: Why not? Nye: The ball's only in contact with the bat for one one-thousandth of a second, and there's just not time to transfer the energy from the cork to the ball. SI: Is there any way cork would help? Nye: For fun I taped nine wine bottle corks to the outside of a bat and hit off a tee. The first two or three times I hit it, it seemed like the ball went about 10 percent farther -- but then the cork shattered. SI: Does the cork just muffle the hollow sound? Nye: I'd be surprised if you could hear anything because the diameter of the hole is so small. When I hit the balls off a tee, all I could hear was a swish, a kung fu sound -- you know, whoosh. SI: Doesn't corking increase bat speed? Nye: If you want to improve bat speed, you can get a lighter bat. What a player could do legally (instead of drilling a hole in his bat to make it lighter) is take the same amount of wood (conceptually) and reconfigure the bat to make it narrower; taper it more slowly, reduce the diameter by 3/32 of an inch -- a width most batters wouldn't even notice because of the thickness of their batting gloves. Sosa could have just gotten himself a new bat, with ever so slightly different dimensions, which would have the same properties as a corked bat, but be completely legal. SI: What's the best way to cheat effectively? Nye: Spitballs, definitely. The spit allows the ball to slip off your fingers, so you can grip it tightly and throw it hard without much spin. SI: What other physics lessons apply to baseball? Nye: Sliding into first base makes you slower! As soon as you leave your feet, you have no propulsion. You're slowing down. SI: Any good home experiments? Nye: Find the sweet spot of your bat by suspending it from a hanger bent into a narrow loop. Hit the bat with a mallet. When it moves back without rotating, you've found the center of percussion. The sweet spot is about half a ball's width up from that point. SI: What's the sweet spot? Nye: Well, there's the center of mass, which is usually where the label is, but if you hit a ball there, you'll break your bat. There's another point, the center of percussion -- where, if you strike the bat, it won't rotate, it won't have any twist in your hands. The center of percussion is the sweet spot.
SI Nye: Oh, wow! We would measure the revolutions per minute of each guy's curve, then measure the length of his fingers and arms and come up with a way to put more and less spin on the pitch. Also, I've got some kooky exercises for visualizing the strike zone while you're doing everyday things. I'd make sure everybody could count steps on the warning track without looking. And based on the length of guys' legs, I'd figure out the fastest way to round a base.
SI Nye: Get rid of the DH, but only after Edgar Martinez retires. SI: Why is Coors Field such a good hitter's park? Nye: When you have less air, there's less lift, less drag. It's the same reason airport runways in Denver and Phoenix are longer -- because when the air is really hot, there are fewer molecules per cubic meter, and fewer molecules means less aerodynamic effect. So the biggest problem at Coors seems to be that pitchers have a much harder time throwing their curveball. You can't get the ball to do as much. SI: So it's harder to fool hitters? Nye: Exactly. The spinning ball drags air with it, what we call the boundary layer, and it tosses or slings molecules one way or another, so with topspin, the ball will shoot down. In that air, there's less lift, less curve. SI: Is there any new research that could have an impact on baseball? Nye: There are two things. For the home hobbyist, there's finite element analysis programs, which mathematically divide an object into tiny cubes. You could get on your PC at home and mathematically design yourself the perfect bat, experiment with center of percussion, center of mass. The other thing is, what the world needs is a bat that has the same characteristics of wood but the longevity of aluminum, so it doesn't break all the time. That would help the high schools and little league teams. SI: When did you become a baseball fan? Nye: Growing up in Washington, I was a Senators fan. And I remember when Ken Harrelson turned a triple play, I was delivering The Washington Post, and I was reading about it going from house to house. I thought it was the coolest thing. And I remember seeing Freddy Valentine, probably the last guy to wear a padded hat while he was batting. SI: What's the greatest thing you've seen in a baseball game? Nye: I remember a catch Ken Griffey Jr. made where he was going the wrong way and he spun and threw out somebody really fast, maybe Otis Nixon? I love watching Ichiro Suzuki, too. He weighs less than I do, and he can throw the ball to home plate without bouncing it from what we call Area 51 in right field. But I don't like the fact that he just wears ICHIRO on the back of his jersey. SI: Why not? Nye: It seems bush league. It's like the old Seattle Mariners who had a guy named Ruppert Jones, and he wore RUPE on the back of his jersey. You could tell the team wasn't serious. --Daniel G. Habib Issue date: June 16, 2003
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