Bats, Balls and the Wind 1
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Team doctors are commonplace in professional baseball. Even psychologists give regular advice. But physicists? Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

Think about it. Whether you're throwing a baseball or hitting it with a bat, the wind and air pressure just might have an effect on how fast, accurate and far that ball goes. That's something that Yale Professor of Physics Robert Adair understands - From 1987 to 1990, Adair served as the first - and so far, the only National League Official Physicist. He also wrote The Physics of Baseball. In an interview, Adair told me how wind speed influences a batter's stats.

Adair: A very large effect; a 400-foot homerun in still air - if there's a ten mile-an-hour breeze behind the batter - that'll add about an extra thirty feet. Conversely, if the wind is blowing in at ten miles an hour, that'll take off about thirty feet. And the difference between 430 feet and 370 feet is a very big difference. And ten miles an hour is about the average wind velocity in the United States.

Bryan: Okay, then how far can someone actually hit a baseball?

Adair: Without a wind, it's pretty difficult to hit a ball over 500 feet. [If] somebody tells me Josh Gibson hit a ball 600 feet, or something like that, I just plain, simply don't believe it.

There is a ball hit by Mickey Mantle that's really well measured, so we know exactly where it hit. It's usually called 560 feet, but that's after it bounced and rolled across the street. But that hit about 510 feet. If you look at the Weather Bureau, there was about a 25 mile an hour wind blowing out.

That's Robert Adair, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Yale and former National League baseball's Physicist. Tomorrow we'll hear more from Adair and about his book, The Physics of Baseball. The Weather Notebook is produced by the soccer mom Margaret Landsman at the Mount Washington Observatory, supported by the National Science Foundation.