The Modern Baseball Pitch: A Physical Perspective

Even though the sport of baseball is a century and a half old, the motion of a baseball in the flight from a pitcher’s hand to home plate is not fully understood. With the introduction of Major League Baseball (MLB)’s HawkEye StatCast system for the 2020 season, the league tracks precise data relating to a pitch’s position. Using publicly available data from Hawk-Eye StatCast, previously known force laws, and recent research on the effect of seams on the flight of a baseball, I derive equations of motion for a pitched ball and use them to create a model depicting the flight of a baseball. Before the pitch, I also examine the effect of various substances on a pitched ball and derive an equation of forces on a fastball’s release to account for adhesive substances popular in MLB prior to recent rule enforcement. [peer advisors: Liu, Qiao; Williams, Jan